Role Of World Health Organization Research Articles

The politics of medical expertise and substance control: WHO consultants for addiction rehabilitation and pharmacy education in Thailand and India during the Cold War.

This paper explores the role of World Health Organization (WHO) medical experts in ambitious projects for substance control during the Cold War in Thailand and India. The circumstances surrounding opium production in these two nations were very different, as were the reasons for requesting expert assistance from the United Nations. Whereas the Thai military regime was concerned with controlling illicit traffic to secure its borders, the Indian government wanted to direct its opium raw materials towards domestic pharmaceutical production. Overlapping and sometimes competing agendas of country governments and international agencies converged upon each project, complicating the consultants' work and requiring careful navigation. In both cases, medicine as a science concerned with human health and well-being was subordinated to more pressing agendas. At the same time, the article argues that WHO consultants left an important impact, though not necessarily due to their skills and training in medicine. Instead, they provided exemplars of sound governance and delivery of public health in a politically stable and economically developed country.

THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION (WHO): THE HEALTH AND HUMAN RIGHTS RELATIONSHIP

As world leaders debate the relevancy of the United Nations (UN), the World Health Organization (WHO) presents as more relevant than ever. WHO's role as the world's health authority places it in a position to co-ordinate all aspects of global human rights issues annexed to health issues. WHO has spent the last 50 years in near avoidance of authority but now is rebounding from that position. Identification of the events that occurred to effect this evolution will be discussed. The identification by WHO that global health cannot be fully achieved without addressing basic human rights is applicable to all aspects of health care delivery and should guide the way we deliver care and set policy locally.

Paths to Global Health: the World Health Organization's Role in Confronting COVID-19 Challenges

This study aims to analyze the role played by WHO as a world health institution in overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the concept of Global Health Governance and Reordering Health to Health Security from Annmarie Bindenagel ehović, this study wants to see changes in the arrangement of health as a vital aspect and agreed by all countries. The findings in this study showing that WHO has made significant changes to the global health order aspects in stages as seen from the way WHO has handled pandemics and epidemics that occurred before COVID-19. However, from the research there is founding that WHO's siding with one country, which is an obstacle according to other countries.

The Paradox of the International Law Development: A Lesson from Covid-19 Pandemic Management

By the year 2019 to early 2022 the world has encountered a health emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the present Covid-19 situation is considered to be under control and countries are progressively recovering from the epidemic, there are a number of lessons that may be derived and studied as part of the development of international law. The article further observes the role of World Health Organization as a primary international organization responsible for keeping the world's health order. Following the effort of Covid-19 management, various measures have been enforced as global government regime efforts, such as quarantine, travel restrictions, and vaccination programs. However, the article highlight that there are many factors have caused obstacles in handling pandemic problems, ranging from the state's capacity to overcome the pandemic's impact to the ideology disparities in implementing global mandates. In this matter, there is a tendency by states which refuse to subject to the general mandate from WHO under the argument that their national interest comes first. This issue then determined that the problem of the Covid-19 pandemic was no longer a health issue but an issue in the evolution of the global legal order. This study will further discuss the efforts taken by WHO as the primary international health organization to combat pandemic issue and analyze to what extent has the management of the COVID-19 pandemic affects international law development.

COVID-19 self-medication treatment: Media's adverse effect based on people's level of education.

Self-medication has become a major concern among nonmedical professionals during the treatment of COVID-19. Such concerns have been attributed to the adverse effect of information shared via media outlets. Here, a survey was undertaken among nonhealthcare professionals to find out the adverse effect of media on self-medication for treating COVID-19. A questionnaire-based survey was conducted electronically among nonmedical professionals (270 respondents). The questionnaire comprised three main components: demographic, education, and factor for self-medication. Statistical analysis of the data was made using analysis of variance to determine the degree of agreement between the response of participants with education below and above graduation. Most of the respondents agreed that they get information about the COVID-19 medicines from different media. However, most of them do not visit the reliable source like World Health Organization (WHO) website to get information about COVID-19. The respondents were aware of the usage of medications such as Remdesvir, azithromycin, vitamins, herbal preparations, paracetamol, and cetirizine for COVID-19. The usage of herbal preparation may be due to their promotion in the media as over the counter drugs (OTC) products. It has been proposed to create more awareness and warning signs for the patients in and around pharmacy and hospital. Media campaign to create awareness for the prevention of COVID-19 spread should also be added with a caution line not to use any medication for treatment without prior consultation with physician. The matter of concern is that only a small fraction of the respondents follow WHO website to get information regarding COVID-19, which mandates to create awareness among the public regarding the role of WHO in healthcare. A significant agreement was noted between below graduates and post-graduates regarding questions such as visiting WHO website and the safety of taking medicine without consulting physician. Media is a contributing factor to self-medication, and measures of caution are highly imperative.

The Role of World Health Organization in the Face of COVID-19 Global Crisis: The Contradiction between Ethical Principles and Political Tensions.

The Role of World Health Organization in the Face of COVID-19 Global Crisis: The Contradiction between Ethical Principles and Political Tensions.

Relevance of the world health organization in a multipolar world in solving global health challenges.

There have been many criticisms about the World Health Organization (WHO) in the last decade. In a multipolar world, there are rivalries between nations and geopolitical regions. However, health issues remain outside the murky world of politics due to their far-reaching consequences on human society. The power conferred on the WHO is very significant in protecting the health and well-being of the global population. As a neutral organization, the WHO is supposed to uphold people's rights to health, especially in controlling diseases of international importance. The paper highlighted the significant roles of the WHO in leadership issues, research and development, solving disputes among countries, providing resources for low-performing regions, regulating international health laws, responding to a humanitarian crisis, and communicating during the crisis. Further, evidence from global literature critically analyzed the enforcement role of WHO on international health regulations (IHRs).

Transitioning to Digital Systems: The Role of World Health Organization's Digital Adaptation Kits in Operationalizing Recommendations and Interoperability Standards.

The transition from paper to digital systems requires quality assurance of the underlying content and application of data standards for interoperability. The World Health Organization (WHO) developed digital adaptation kits (DAKs) as an operational and software-neutral mechanism to translate WHO guidelines into a standardized format that can be more easily incorporated into digital systems. WHO convened health program area and digital leads, reviewed existing approaches for requirements gathering, mapped to established standards, and incorporated research findings to define DAK components. For each health domain area, the DAKs distill WHO guidelines to specify the health interventions, personas, user scenarios, business process workflows, core data elements mapped to terminology codes, decision-support logic, program indicators, and functional and nonfunctional requirements. DAKs aim to catalyze quality of care and facilitate data use and interoperability as part of WHO's vision of SMART (Standards-based, Machine-readable, Adaptive, Requirements-based, and Testable) guidelines. Efforts will be needed to strengthen a collaborative approach for the uptake of DAKs within the local digital ecosystem and national health policies.

Revisiting the Term "Compassionate Use" and Leadership of the World Health Organization in Resolving Confusion in the Age of COVID-19 and Beyond.

We discuss the term "compassionate use" (CU) as an example of terminology having a huge impact on drug regulation. CU is used in many confusing situations, and its meaning varies significantly. We ethically affirm the necessity of CU. We insist that CU should be properly placed in exceptional status. The regulation of CUs is much more lenient than that of clinical trials because of the difference in the purpose. Whether consciously or unconsciously, abuse results in confusion and is never acceptable. The World Health Organization (WHO) proposed not to use the previous term CU but to replace it with another one. WHO also proposed the term MEURI (monitored emergency use of unregistered and experimental interventions). However, this was extremely incomplete, and WHO used the term CU subsequently. The main purpose of the proposal needs to be thoroughly implemented. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, expectations regarding WHO's role and leadership in global health issues are rising. We hope that WHO will play a major role in promoting research ethics preparedness while discontinuing the use of confusing terms such as CU and will develop alternative terms and their content. We discuss the evaluation of MEURI, the Japanese version of CU, and appropriate and inappropriate terminology related to the therapeutic use of unapproved drugs. We also discuss the expected appearance of CU including its name. It is appropriate to target group/cohort patients and unapproved drugs in the late stage of development. It is also important to solve the problem of incentives for CUs of pharmaceutical companies that are rushing to obtain marketing approval. The UK's Early Access to Medicine Scheme has provided many suggestions. We believe that our opinion can contribute to WHO's efforts to resolve the confusion and promote research ethics preparedness in health emergencies.

The Role of WHO in the First Year of the Fight Against COVID-19

The Covid-19 pandemic, which began as just another routine outbreak of infection in a region where many other virus infections are endemic (for example, influenza), became in a matter of months a global medical challenge to states and international institutions and a threat in many other respects. The World Health Organization (WHO) was established in 1948 as part of the UN system to protect health as a fundamental human right and to respond to similar medical challenges. From its inception, WHO has been dealing with issues common to the health care system -for example, creating an international classification of diseases to serve as the cornerstone of morbidity analysis and statistics worldwide - and with individual regional problems. In the early 1950s, for example, the WHO European Region was established to restore the health care system devastated by World War II. The spread of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) proved to be a major test for the entire WHO system, which in 1983-1987 focused on fighting it.

Offline: Why President Trump is wrong about WHO

April 14, 2020: President Trump, speaking at The White House—“Today, I am instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess the World Health Organization's role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus…The WHO's reliance on China's disclosures likely caused a 20-fold increase in cases worldwide, and it may be much more than that. The WHO has not addressed a single one of these concerns nor provided a serious explanation that acknowledges its own mistakes, of which there were many…so much death has been caused by their mistakes.” Here are the facts.

The role of World Health Organization and Information Technology in improving patient safety through reducing medical errors

When it comes to medical errors, everyone cites the statistics provided by the Institute of Medicine. The statistics is provided continually by the American Medical Community and refl ects their tendency in reducing medical errors and increasing the level of patient safety [1-4]. However, most countries in the world try to hide the ineffi ciency of the members of their health care team, especially physicians [5-8].

Insights from outside BJOG

Insights from outside BJOG

World Health Organization Joint External Evaluations in the Eastern Mediterranean Region, 2016-17.

By 2014, only 33% of countries had self-reported compliance with the International Health Regulations (2005), including 8 countries from the Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR). During the Ebola epidemic, the discovery of a gap between objective assessment and self-reports for certain IHR capacities prompted the World Health Organization (WHO) to review and update the IHR monitoring and evaluation framework to include a voluntary objective review process, called Joint External Evaluation (JEE), that did not exist before. The regional committee for the EMR approved the JEE and encouraged its 21 member states to volunteer for reviews. Standardized processes and procedures were developed for conducting JEEs. Of the 52 JEEs completed to date globally, 14 (27%) are from the EMR. Three (21%) of 14 member states completing the JEE in the EMR have also worked on a post-JEE national action plan for health security (NAPHS). A survey conducted about the JEE experience from focal points in EMR member states underlined the strengths of the JEE process: its multisectoral and open discussion approach; standardization of the JEE process; WHO's critical role in supporting JEE preparation and conduct; and the need for guidance development for a costed NAPHS. The success of JEEs depends not only on proper preparations and completion of the JEE but also on the development of a country-led, owned, and costed NAPHS and its implementation, including financial commitments along with donor and partners' engagement and coordination.

Publication of the Korea-WHO Cooperation History - 70 Years of Working Together for Heath: World Health Organization and the Republic of Korea.

The World Health Organization (WHO) have been in collaborative efforts with the Republic of Korea in keeping of and for better health for all for the past decades. From the control of parasites to building of community health system in rural places, the works has now resulted in healthier Korea than ever, and has transformed the role of engaging as the world leader in contribution of health and development. Seventy years of independence, war, and poverty, transforming from a recipient country of official development assistance to a significant donor to the global society, we have emphasized the importance of international cooperation and the role of WHO in the past years in Korea and neighboring countries. Looking back of the past is meaningful to diagnose the present problems, and to foresee the future of our world.

World Health Organization: Overhaul or Dismantle?

The authors reflect on whether the World Health Organization (WHO) can be reformed or if it needs to be dismantled as of 2016, and it mentions the history of United Nations agencies, the WHO's global public health leadership role, and the challenges that the WHO faces in relation to the World Bank, private foundations, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, & Malaria financing organization. WHO-related bureaucracy and organization inertia are assessed.

The Evolution of Human Rights in World Health Organization Policy and the Future of Human Rights Through Global Health Governance

The World Health Organization (WHO) was intended to serve at the forefront of efforts to realize human rights to advance global health, and yet this promise of a rights-based approach to health has long been threatened by political constraints in international relations, organizational resistance to legal discourses, and medical ambivalence toward human rights. Through legal research on international treaty obligations, historical research in the WHO organizational archives, and interview research with global health stakeholders, this research examines WHO’s contributions to (and, in many cases, negligence of) the rights-based approach to health. Based upon such research, this article analyzes the evolving role of WHO in the development and implementation of human rights for global health, reviews the current state of human rights leadership in the WHO Secretariat, and looks to future institutions to reclaim the mantle of human rights as a normative framework for global health governance.

기능주의 관점에서 본 세계보건기구의 설립과 역할

Since its establishment in 1948, World Health Organization (WHO) has tried and facilitated international cooperation of public health under goal of the highest attainable and gained outcomes like eradication of smallpox and polio, turning itself into representative of international public health. However, there was discord between member nations during cold war era, and status of WHO experienced rise and fall after its establishment. WHO, representative international health organization, also has not been freed from influences from international regime changes, which means that discussion on internal causes of WHO functionings should be expanded more. In this study, functionalism was tested as one of international relations theory that tries to explain establishment and role of WHO. Especially, this study analyzed problems and problem-solving process that WHO had to face by using Imber`s five steps theory that arranged chronologically theory of Mitrany. We mainly investigated secondary source that described historic facts on rise and fall of WHO in terms of roles and functionings during establishment of WHO, cold war era, and international cooperation of public health. The roles of WHO were analyzed by selecting gains of WHO in post cold war era. The functionalism arrangement of Imber was appropriate to some extent in explaining establishment and role of WHO. The first step was International Sanitary Conference in 1851 that made nations to recognize international cooperation of public health, and second step was establishment of WHO that handles public health as an international organization. Recent cases of Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and International Health Regulations showed that each nation agreed with an international norm that they had to cooperate each other to tackle infectious diseases and smoking, and this implies that these were emergence of global governance. This process was third step of Imber`s theory (nations had a gain from international cooperation would agree with expansion of authority of international organization). However, last two steps of theory are still not realized. The partial success of WHO was based on functional elements that WHO deals with non-political elements, human resources centering on professionals, and democratic decision making process. This essential and non-political characteristics mean that necessity of international cooperation catalyzed by WHO would continue despite of global governance era when global health governance get faced more challenges.

The evolving WHO: Implications for global health security

The World Health Organization (WHO) is central to the international community's efforts to control infectious disease outbreaks. In recent years, however, the Organization's powers have undergone substantial revision following a series of interconnected global events including the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak, the revised International Health Regulations, the emergence and spread of avian influenza, and more recently, the 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu pandemic. This paper explores how the WHO's role, authority and autonomy have been shaped and re-shaped, and examines what this may mean for the future of global health security.

WHO-REMPAN FOR GLOBAL HEALTH SECURITY AND STRENGTHENING PREPAREDNESS AND RESPONSE TO RADIATION EMERGENCIES

In response to the changing global environment and emerging new issues related to health security, the World Health Organization (WHO) is putting in place new tools for collective defense, such as the revised International Health Regulations (IHR) (2005). The new framework puts additional responsibilities on both Member States and WHO itself in order to effectively implement the IHR (2005) and react effectively in case of public health emergency events of any nature. Since its establishment in 1987, the Radiation Emergency Medical Preparedness and Assistance Network of WHO (WHO-REMPAN) has become an important asset for the organization's capacity to respond to radiation emergencies and to assist its Member States to strengthen their own response capacities. The paper describes in detail the framework for the WHO's role in preparedness and response to radiation emergencies, including Emergency Conventions and IHR (2005), and how the WHO-REMPAN, through its activities (i.e., technical guidelines development, training, education, research, and information sharing), provides a significant contribution to the organization's program of work towards achievement of the global health security goal.