The World Health Organization
A History

A history of the World Health Organization, covering major achievements in its seventy years while also highlighting the organization's internal tensions.

Marcos Cueto (Author), Theodore M. Brown (Author), Elizabeth Fee (Author)

9781108483575, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 11 April 2019

388 pages, 54 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.6 x 2.2 cm, 0.75 kg

'… the authors are to be congratulated, not only for presenting us with this splendid, up-to-date and excellently contextualized history of the WHO, which constitutes a reference work about this international agency; but also for inviting us to engage in a historical reflection, and for drawing lessons from this history to be applied to the present and future of the mission of the WHO.' María-Isabel Porras-Gallo, Metascience

According to its Constitution, the mission of the World Health Organization (WHO) was nothing less than the 'attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health' without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic status, or social condition. But how consistently and how well has the WHO pursued this mission since 1946? This comprehensive and engaging new history explores these questions by looking at its origins and its institutional antecedents, while also considering its contemporary and future roles. It examines how the WHO was shaped by the particular environments of the postwar period and the Cold War, the relative influence of the US and other approaches to healthcare, and its place alongside sometimes competing international bodies such as UNICEF, the World Bank, and the Gates Foundation. The authors re-evaluate the relative success and failure of critical WHO campaigns, from early malaria and smallpox eradication programs to struggles with Ebola today.

Introduction
1. The making of an international health establishment
2. The birth of the World Health Organization, 1945–8
3. The start-up years, 1948–55
4. The Cold War and eradication
5. Overcoming the warming of the Cold War: smallpox eradication
6. The transition from 'family planning' to 'sexual and reproductive rights'
7. The vicissitudes of primary health care
8. The response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic
9. An embattled director-general and the persistence of the WHO
10. The competitive world of global health
11. The World Health Organization in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Subject Areas: History of medicine [MBX], General & world history [HBG]