World Health Organization Initiatives

In 1987, I had the good fortune to spend several months at the World Health Organization for the Division of Adolescent and School Health of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was one of my most prized experiences and was capped off by spending several days attending the World Health Assembly in 1987. That meeting occurs every year in May. At that time we were still early in the days of the Global Programme on AIDS and Tobacco Control, and several resolutions and initiatives emerged from that meeting.

As a result, this week I’m thinking about the World Health Assembly, an annual meeting held every May in Geneva, Switzerland, hosted by the World Health Organization (WHO). The WHO website describes the World Health Assembly as “the decision-making body of WHO. It is attended by delegations from all WHO Member States and focuses on a specific health agenda prepared by the Executive Board.” More information on the assembly and can be found at the WHO Media Center website.

The main theme of this year’s assembly is the global non-communicable diseases (NCD) burden. There are many people, both within and outside the field of public health, that believe NCD’s are a major problem in the affluent or aged. It is becoming increasingly clear that these boundaries do not describe the breadth of the challenge with these conditions. We now know that the four non-communicable diseases, cardiovascular disease, cancer, chronic lung diseases and diabetes, kill three in five people worldwide while also creating a great socioeconomic burden. And, surprisingly, this particularly true in developing nations. A PDF version of the Global Status Report on NCD, published by WHO in 2010 is available here.

WHO has also published an interactive map that allows users to see the global distribution and challenges from NCD on its website. When you look at this map you may be surprised by what you see, 36 million of the 57 million global deaths in 2008 were due to NCDs; 29% of NCD deaths in low- and middle-income countries in 2008 occurred before the age of 60; and, 80% of premature heart disease, stroke and diabetes deaths can be prevented.

For those interested in the global burden of NCDs and the challenges of addressing these issues, WHO has identified three high-level meetings this year – two of which have already occurred and one that is going to be held in New York City in September. The upcoming meeting at the United Nations will be the second global meeting sponsored by the UN focusing on global health. Here’s more information from the WHO News website on these meetings:

• WHO global forum: Addressing the challenge of noncommunicable diseases
27 April 2011 -- Moscow, the Russian Federation
• First global ministerial conference on healthy lifestyles and noncommunicable disease control
28-29 April 2011 -- Moscow, the Russian Federation
• United Nations High-level Meeting on noncommunicable disease prevention and control
19-20 September 2011 -- New York, USA

There is also a Twitter hashtag feed (#worldhealthassembly) for the World Health Assembly for those who have Twitter accounts and would like to follow. The opening remarks of the Director-General, Dr. Margaret Chan are available in both transcript and streaming audio. This speech, “Remember the People,” is worth reading and listening to because it carries a warning that the World Health Organization is so overextended and underfunded that it may not be able to continue delivering programs, technical assistance and other services at the level expected. A brief video report detailing some of these issues can be found here on the WHO YouTube Channel.

In closing, I want to refer you to the address given by Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In this address he talked about his vision for the next decade. He has pledged to give up to $100 billion dollars of his personal fortune to influence our global health and education efforts. He talked about the eradication of polio, the creation of five or six new vaccines available to the nations of the world at affordable prices, and a world in which there are systems available to deliver vaccines to every child, all within the current decade. Read his keynote address to the World Health Assembly or listen to the address here.

“Together, we can make this the decade in which we take full advantage of the technology of vaccines,” Gates said. “When we do it, we will build an entirely new future based on the understanding that global health is the cornerstone of global prosperity.”