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The story
Origin and founding
Arcot Ramaswamy Mudaliar, the first president of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in 1946, played a central role in founding the World Health Organization (WHO). Under his presidency, ECOSOC initiated the international conference that established the WHO as a specialized UN agency.
The International Sanitary Conferences (ISC), the first of which was held on 23 June 1851, were a series of conferences that took place until 1938, about 87 years. The first conference, in Paris, was almost solely concerned with cholera, which would remain the disease of major concern for the ISC for most of the 19th century. With the cause, origin, and communicability of many epidemic diseases still uncertain and a matter of scientific argument, international agreement on appropriate measures was difficult to reach. Seven of these international conferences, spanning 41 years, were convened before any resulted in a multi-state international agreement. The seventh conference, in Venice in 1892, finally resulted in a convention. It was concerned only with the sanitary control of shipping traversing the Suez Canal, and was an effort to guard against importation of cholera.
Five years later, in 1897, a convention concerning the bubonic plague was signed by sixteen of the nineteen states attending the Venice conference. While Denmark, Sweden–Norway, and the US did not sign this convention, it was unanimously agreed that the work of the prior conferences should be codified for implementation. Subsequent conferences, from 1902 until the final one in 1938, widened the diseases of concern for the ISC, and included discussions of responses to yellow fever, brucellosis, leprosy, tuberculosis, and typhoid. In part as a result of the successes of the Conferences, the Pan-American Sanitary Bureau (1902) and the Office International d'Hygiène Publique or "International office of Public Hygiene" in English (1907) were soon founded. When the League of Nations was formed in 1920, it established the Health Organization of the League of Nations. After World War II, the United Nations (UN) assembled all the other health organizations to form the WHO.
The WHO played a crucial role in coordinating the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic, providing essential guidelines on preventive measures, supporting research on vaccines, and facilitating vaccine distribution through initiatives like COVAX.
Establishment
During the 1945 United Nations Conference on International Organization, Szeming Sze, a delegate from the Republic of China, conferred with Norwegian and Brazilian delegates on creating an international health organization under the auspices of the new United Nations. After failing to get a resolution passed on the subject, Alger Hiss, the secretary general of the conference, recommended using a declaration to establish such an organization. Sze and other delegates lobbied and a declaration passed calling for an international conference on health. The use of the word "world", rather than "international", emphasized the truly global nature of what the organization was seeking to achieve. The constitution of the World Health Organization was signed by all 51 countries of the United Nations, and by 10 other countries, on 22 July 1946. It thus became the first specialized agency of the United Nations to which every member subscribed. Its constitution formally came into force on the first World Health Day on 7 April 1948, when it was ratified by the 26th member state. The WHO formally began its work on 1 September 1948.
When the first meeting of the World Health Assembly ended on 24 July 1948, a budget of US$5 million (then £1,250,000) had been secured for the 1949 year. G. Brock Chisholm was appointed director-general of the WHO, having served as executive secretary and a founding member during the planning stages, while Andrija Štampar was the assembly's first president. Its first priorities were to control the spread of malaria, tuberculosis and sexually transmitted infections, improve maternal and child health, nutrition and environmental hygiene. Its first legislative act was concerning the compilation of accurate statistics on the spread and morbidity of disease. The logo of the World Health Organization features the Rod of Asclepius as a symbol for healing.
In 1959, the WHO signed Agreement WHA 12–40 with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which says:
whenever either organization proposes to initiate a programme or activity on a subject in which the other organization has or may have a substantial interest, the first party shall consult the other with a view to adjusting the matter by mutual agreement.
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The nature of this statement has led some groups and activists including Women in Europe for a Common Future to claim that the WHO is restricted in its ability to investigate the effects on human health of radiation caused by the use of nuclear power and the continuing effects of nuclear disasters in Chernobyl and Fukushima. They believe WHO must regain what they see as independence. Independent WHO held a weekly vigil from 2007 to 2017 in front of WHO headquarters. However, as pointed out by Foreman in clause 2, it states:
In particular, and in accordance with the Constitution of the World Health Organization and the Statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency and its agreement with the United Nations together with the exchange of letters related thereto, and taking into account the respective co-ordinating responsibilities of both organizations, it is recognized by the World Health Organization that the International Atomic Energy Agency has the primary responsibility for encouraging, assisting and co-ordinating research and development and practical application of atomic energy for peaceful uses throughout the world without prejudice to the right of the World Health Organization to concern itself with promoting, developing, assisting and co-ordinating international health work, including research, in all its aspects.
The key text is highlighted in bold, the agreement in clause 2 states that the WHO is free to perform any health-related work.
Operational history
In 1947, the WHO established an epidemiological information service via telex. Two years later, in 1949, the Soviet Union and its constituent republics quit the organization over its unwillingness to share the penicillin recipe; they did not return until 1956. In 1950, a mass tuberculosis inoculation campaign using the BCG vaccine began.
The malaria eradication programme was launched in 1955, though its objectives were later revised so that in most regions the goal shifted from eradication to control. In 1958, Viktor Zhdanov, Deputy Minister of Health of the USSR, urged the World Health Assembly to undertake a global initiative to eradicate smallpox, leading to the adoption of Resolution WHA11.54.
The WHO's first report on diabetes mellitus was issued in 1965, the same year that the International Agency for Research on Cancer was established. In 1966, the organization moved its headquarters from the Ariana wing at the Palace of Nations to a new purpose-built facility in Geneva.
By 1967, the WHO intensified the global smallpox eradication campaign, contributing $2.4 million annually and adopting new disease surveillance methods at a time when 2 million people were dying of smallpox each year. The main challenge was underreporting of cases, which WHO addressed by creating a network of consultants to help countries implement surveillance and containment. The organization also helped manage the last European outbreak, which occurred in Yugoslavia in 1972. After more than two decades of effort, a Global Commission declared in 1979 that smallpox had been eradicated—the first disease in history to be eliminated by human effort.
In 1974, the WHO launched the Expanded Programme on Immunization and also began its control programme for onchocerciasis, in partnership with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the World Bank. The following year, it introduced the Special Programme for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases (TDR), co-sponsored by UNICEF, UNDP, and the World Bank, in response to a 1974 WHA resolution. The TDR aimed to coordinate international research into the diagnosis, treatment, and control of tropical diseases, while also building research capacity in endemic countries.
In 1976, the WHA passed a resolution on disability prevention and rehabilitation, emphasizing community-driven care. This was followed in 1977 by the first list of essential medicines, and in 1978 by the declaration of the ambitious goal of "Health For All".
1986: The WHO began its global programme on HIV/AIDS. Two years later preventing discrimination against patients was attended to and in 1996 the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) was formed.
1988: The Global Polio Eradication Initiative was established.
1995: The WHO established an independent International Commission for the Certification of Dracunculiasis Eradication (Guinea worm disease eradication; ICCDE). The ICCDE recommends to the WHO which countries fulfil requirements for certification. It also has role in advising on progress made towards elthe imination of transmission and processes for verification.
1998: The WHO's director-general highlighted gains in child survival, reduced infant mortality, increased life expectancy and reduced rates of "scourges" such as smallpox and polio on the fiftieth anniversary of WHO's founding. He, did, however, accept that more had to be done to assist maternal health and that progress in this area had been slow.
2000: The Stop TB Partnership was created along with the UN's formulation of the Millennium Development Goals.
2001: The measles initiative was formed, and credited with reducing global deaths from the disease by 68% by 2007.
2002: The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria was drawn up to improve the resources available.
2005: The WHO revises International Health Regulations (IHR) in light of emerging health threats and the experience of the 2002/3 SARS epidemic, authorizing WHO, among other things, to declare a health threat a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.
2006: The WHO endorsed the world's first official HIV/AIDS Toolkit for Zimbabwe, which formed the basis for global prevention, treatment, and support the plan to fight the AIDS pandemic.
2006: The WHO launches the Global action plan for influenza vaccines.
2016: The Global action plan for influenza vaccines ends with a report which concludes that while substantial progress has been made over the 10 years of the Plan, the world is still not ready to respond to an influenza pandemic.
2016: Following the perceived failure of the response to the West Africa Ebola outbreak, the World Health Emergencies programme was formed, changing the WHO from just being a "normative" agency to one that responds operationally to health emergencies.
2020: the World Health Organization announced that it had classified the novel coronavirus outbreak as a public health emergency of international concern. The novel coronavirus was a new strain of coronavirus that had never been detected in humans before. The WHO named this new coronavirus "COVID-19" or "2019-nCov".
2022: The WHO suggests formation of a Global Health Emergency Council, with a new global health emergency workforce, and recommends revision of the International Health Regulations.
2024: WHO has declared the spread of mpox (formerly monkeypox) in several African countries a public health emergency of international concern, marking the second such declaration in the last two years due to the virus's transmission. In September 2025, the director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that mpox is no longer an emergency.
2026: The United States formally withdrew from the WHO, citing alleged failures in the agency's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, after notice had been given by President Donald Trump on his first day in office on 20 January 2025. The administration said it would not rejoin or participate as an observer and instead pursued bilateral cooperation on global health issues, while disputing that the US is required to pay approximately $260 million in outstanding fees prior to withdrawal. The withdrawal triggered a financial crisis at the Organization, leading to major budget cuts, a halving of its management team, and plans to reduce staff by about one quarter. As the WHO's largest funder, contributing about 18% of its budget, the US exit created uncertainty over future cooperation, with Director-General Tedros stating that the withdrawal would make both the US and the rest of the world less safe.
From Wikipedia’s article on World Health Organization, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4