The World Health Organization (WHO), as the United Nations specialized agency for health, has been at the centre of international health cooperation for over sixty years. With origins dating from the nineteenth century, WHO’s mandate is the attainment by all people of the highest possible level of health. The huge challenge of fulfilling this objective has not only required high-level technical skills, but has led the organization to engage with a broad range of political and economic interests. WHO has enjoyed many high-profile successes such as the global eradication of smallpox and SARS, and ongoing campaigns against polio and other diseases. On other issues, such as essential drugs, tobacco control and diet and nutrition, efforts to tackle the broader determinants of health has brought the organization into contact with issues such as globalization, poverty, social justice and human rights. Kelley Lee analyzes the WHO’s role in international cooperation, examining its changing structures, key programmes and individuals. Of particular focus are the challenges WHO has faced in recent years given the emergence of other global health initiatives and how WHO has sought to remain effective as the "world’s health conscience" within an increasingly complex global context.

This work presents the broad lines of the action and evolution of the World Health Organization (WHO). It identifies some of the problems WHO has had to face in the past, and will have to confront in the future. It discusses in detail the historical origins, WHO's objectives and the evolution of its strategy and programmes. It reviews its structures as well as the problems raised by its decentralization. It examines the Organization's action in the field of technical cooperation and looks into several of WHO's more important past and present programmes. In its general conclusion, it attempts to envisage the future of the Organization. The present study is based essentially on the official documentation of the WHO, open and restricted. The strength of this book lies in the personal experience of the main author, a former WHO official, who has orientated the book's research in specific directions and has added some complementary information.

A history of the World Health Organization, covering major achievements in its seventy years while also highlighting the organization's internal tensions. This account by three leading historians of medicine examines how well the organization has pursued its aim of everyone, everywhere attaining the highest possible level of health.

"The World Health Organization's history spans more than six decades. The past twenty years has been a particularly busy period in the organization's development, given the transition from international to global health cooperation and thus the need to adapt to major changes in its operating environment. Consequently, the WHO has been a direct part of new institutional arrangements and has shared in increased funding to provide for global health. It has also had to adapt its activities and programs in response to rival initiatives, leading to many changes--not only to the names of specific parts of the WHO but also to the nature of their activities. This second edition explores the organization's institutional complexity."--Back cover.

Considers (80) H.J. Res. 161.

Since 1948, the World Health Organization (WHO) has launched numerous programs aimed at improving health conditions around the globe, ranging from efforts to eradicate smallpox to education programs about the health risks of smoking. In setting global health priorities and carrying out initiatives, the WHO bureaucracy has faced the challenge of reconciling the preferences of a small minority of wealthy nations, who fund the organization, with the demands of poorer member countries, who hold the majority of votes. In The World Health Organization between North and South, Nitsan Chorev shows how the WHO bureaucracy has succeeded not only in avoiding having its agenda co-opted by either coalition of member states but also in reaching a consensus that fit the bureaucracy's own principles and interests. Chorev assesses the response of the WHO bureaucracy to member-state pressure in two particularly contentious moments: when during the 1970s and early 1980s developing countries forcefully called for a more equal international economic order, and when in the 1990s the United States and other wealthy countries demanded international organizations adopt neoliberal economic reforms. In analyzing these two periods, Chorev demonstrates how strategic maneuvering made it possible for a vulnerable bureaucracy to preserve a relatively autonomous agenda, promote a consistent set of values, and protect its interests in the face of challenges from developing and developed countries alike.

Brock Chisholm was one of the most influential Canadians of the twentieth century. A world-renowned psychiatrist, he was the first director-general of the World Health Organization and built it up against overwhelming political odds in the years immediately following the Second World War. An atheist and a fierce critic of jingoistic nationalism, he supported world peace and world government and became a champion of the United Nations and the WHO. Post-1945 international politics, global health issues, and medical history intersect in this highly readable account of a remarkable Canadian.