The World Health Organization

Abstract

Since the mid-nineteenth century physicians, diplomats, commerce leaders, and politicians have been discussing and implementing an international-health global system that ranges from epidemiological-surveillance agreements of transnational epidemics to institutions promoting social and medical reforms of the living conditions of the poor. Of all these efforts the work of the World Health Organization, WHO (created in 1948) has been the boldest attempt to reach an international understanding among nations of the need of articulation of their action in matters of disease control. However, the WHO has been the house of two different perspectives to control health that can be summarized as a biomedical and technical approach and a socio-medical perspective. During the past few years, old and new historical actors, like officers of the WHO, health activists, and bilateral agencies, have been part of these perspectives and discussed if health is, or not, a global public good.