It took seven international conferences and 41 years to agree on fighting cholera
Long before the World Health Organization existed, European states met repeatedly to coordinate against cholera. Because nobody agreed on how diseases spread, the first binding deal only arrived in Venice in 1892, and it covered just ships passing through the Suez Canal. That slow start shaped the global health body founded in 1948.
The first International Sanitary Conference opened in Paris on 23 June 1851, and the series ran until 1938. Cholera dominated the agenda for most of the nineteenth century, yet scientific arguments over the cause and transmission of epidemics kept delegates from agreeing on measures. After the Venice convention of 1892, a plague agreement followed in 1897, signed by sixteen of nineteen states present; Denmark, Sweden–Norway and the United States held out. Later meetings added yellow fever, leprosy, tuberculosis and typhoid to the list.
Those meetings spawned institutions. A Pan-American Sanitary Bureau appeared in 1902 and a Paris-based public hygiene office in 1907, and the League of Nations set up its own Health Organization in 1920. At the 1945 founding conference of the United Nations, Szeming Sze, a delegate from the Republic of China, worked with Norwegian and Brazilian colleagues to add a health agency. When a formal resolution failed, the conference secretary general Alger Hiss suggested a declaration instead, and it passed. Choosing the word world over international was deliberate.
All 51 UN members plus ten other countries signed the constitution on 22 July 1946, making it the first specialised agency every member joined. It came into force on 7 April 1948, the first World Health Day, when a 26th state ratified, and work began that September. The new body absorbed its predecessors, including the International Classification of Diseases. Arcot Ramaswamy Mudaliar, first president of the UN Economic and Social Council, helped launch the founding conference.
From its Geneva headquarters, with six regional and 150 field offices, the agency defines health broadly as complete physical, mental and social well-being rather than simply not being ill. It led the eradication of smallpox, has brought polio close to extinction and helped develop an Ebola vaccine. The World Health Assembly of 193 member states picks the director-general, currently Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of Ethiopia, and funding comes mostly from members, then private donors.
Source: World Health Organization
