Abstract

The Bulletin of the World Health Organization is recognized as one of the world's pre-eminent public health journals, having maintained its role as the organization's principal scientific organ, This dual focus has not sprung up overnight but has been the result of an evolutionary process over its 60-year history. Several changes to both its content and format and, crucially, the publication of several landmark articles have helped forge the journal's unique identity. When it was launched in 1948, as a deliberate continuation of the earlier Bulletin of the League of Nations Health Organization, the Bulletin was expected to have an important influence on medical opinion in the widest sense, and especially on the opinions of those responsible for formulating and guiding medical theory and practice: that is, medical scientists and teachers, and public health administrators. The first few issues of the Bulletin were distributed free to national health and research institutes, medical schools and faculty libraries, often in exchange for medical journals. Subscriptions were soon offered; in June 1948, there were almost 600 paid subscribers, though few were private individuals. The work of WHO'S Expert Advisory Committees--external experts invited to advise WHO on specific subjects--was the main inspiration for much of the Bulletin's early content. The journal's main function at that time was also to publish studies relevant to the Expert Committees' work and to cover subjects for which there were experts within the WHO secretariat. The Executive Board believed the Bulletin should publish articles on the following six categories: * laboratory studies on topics such as biological standardization and communicable diseases, one of the main objectives being to encourage the use of uniform methods to obtain comparable results; * internationally significant studies of results achieved by specific disease control methods; * studies of the geographical distribution of diseases; * reports of surveys, especially those involving studies of relevant world literature and visits to countries; reports of original findings made in the course of field programmes; and * review articles based primarily on surveys of literature summarizing the present state of knowledge in different fields By October 1958, the Bulletin was mainly publishing articles on communicable diseases, especially malaria and tuberculosis. By this time, entire issues of the Bulletin dedicated to a specific topic had started to appear, ranging from plague control (1953) and environmental sanitation (1954) to occupational health (1955) and the serology of syphilis (1956). In 1963, the Bulletin started to publish supplements to the regular volumes, covering topics of interest to the public health community--often with a more public health than scientific focus. One of the first was devoted to meningitis in Africa. This balance between science and its application for public health purposes would continue to characterize the journal for decades to come. By the end of the 1950s, the Bulletin had established a clear character. A report delivered to the 25th session of the WHO Executive Board in 1959 noted that 67% of articles published since the journal's inception qualified as international or unrelated to a geographical area. The Bulletin's format was also evolving along with the content. In 1950, a bibliographical section (containing references relevant to the sanitary conventions) was included and the Executive Board authorized the publication of a single edition containing articles in French or English, with summaries in both these working languages. In 1959, the format and the cover were redesigned, with a larger page size and smaller print with a double-column layout, facilitating the inclusion of more tables, graphs, maps and other illustrative material. …

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