PUBLIC HEALTH, INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION

Abstract

This chapter describes the historical evolution of international cooperation in public health. International cooperation in public health began to develop in the 19th century, when faster means of transport and growing international commerce led to more rapid and extensive spread of communicable diseases endemic in Africa and Asia. To organize the defense of Europe against cholera and other pestilential diseases, governments sought to place a barrier in their way. An international sanitary conference convened in Paris in 1851 to harmonize the conflicting maritime quarantine requirements in Mediterranean ports drew up an international sanitary convention, but hardly any country ratified it. Nine further conferences held toward the end of the century resulted in other sanitary conventions on cholera and plague, which became consolidated in 1903 in a single text. At the regional level, a Far Eastern Bureau of the Health Organization was set up in Singapore in 1925. Other regional bodies were the four Sanitary Councils in Alexandria, Constantinople, Tehran, and Tangier, which served as local epidemiological intelligence stations.