706 



RECENT EVALUATIONS OF THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION 



G. E. W. Wolstenholme of the Ciba Foundation in London has 

 praised the achievements of WHO and deplores the lack of news cov- 

 erage concerning its constructive work. Of all the special United Na- 

 tions agencies, fie says, none "* * * contributes more to current im- 

 provements in our daily lives and gives more hope of a better future 

 for all mankind than the WHO." Many people in positions of respon- 

 sibility were totally ignorant of the work of this agency. In a recent 

 symposium giving emphasis on our "stressful, diseased, crowded, ill- 

 educated and uncooperative world," he said : ^ 



WHO is a world intelligence agency for communicable 

 diseases, on which all quarantine measures are based. It spon- 

 sors international reference laboratories for diseases which 

 scorn national frontiers. It is the ultimate authority on the 

 health standards of foods, on vaccines, drugs, systems of 

 disease classification and diagnostic procedures, and it runs 

 the counter-spy system against the traffic in illicit and dan- 

 gerous drugs of addiction. As the recorder of rare reactions 

 to drugs, it may forestall another thalidomide-like tragedy. 

 It awards some 2,500 fellowships a year for postgraduate 

 training in medicine, nursing and environmental health. It 

 organizes each year about 40 short instruction courses and 

 around 80 technical conferences. It contributes at any one 

 time, in manpower and in money, to 1,000 health projects in 

 150 countries. 



WHO is an organization which between 1948 and 1963 

 treated, for example, 43 million people in 45 countries for the 

 syphilis-like disease of yaws, and set lf)0,000 trained workers 

 to the task of essentially eliminating malaria, to which half the 

 world's peoples were exposed — and almost one-third of the 

 world's population has by now been given protection from 

 malaria, though 360 million remain at risk. It is WHO which 

 lends hundreds of experts and teaches thousands of health 

 workers to attack a host of disorders and diseases: for ex- 

 ample, smallpox (a campaign to vaccinate 220 million in one 

 year has just begun, to continue over ten years) ; tuberculosis 

 (still some two to three million preventable deaths each year) ; 

 leprosy (about 15 million j^eople in 50 or 60 countries blighted 

 by its mutilation) ; maternal and infant mortality (a ten- 

 fold difference between the most fortunate and the unhappiest 

 countries) ; cancer, heart disease, rheumatism (the bijr killers 

 and cripplers with widely varying incidence in different 

 areas) : water, soil and air T)ollntion (in tlie world as a whole 

 it is said that one in four hospital patients is ill because of 

 infectefd ^^ater^ : blindness (10 to 12 million siirhtless) : deaf- 

 ness (millions still uncounted) : infestations by parasites 

 (many hundreds of millions of people chronically weakened 

 and defeated by three or four such diseases together) ; mental 

 illness ; senility ; accidents ; malnutrition : and animal diseases. 



^■^ G. F. W. Wolstenhnliup. In "Health of Mankinrt," A Ciba Foundation Symposium. (Bos- 

 ton. Little Brown and Company, 1967), pages 254-6. 



