World Health Organization Essay

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The World Health Organization (WHO) is the body of the United Nations (UN) responsible for directing and coordinating health. WHO plays a vital role as an actor in the field of international public health and international public health policy. Since its inception, WHO has been at the forefront of many breakthroughs in the field including the elimination of Smallpox in 1979 which is described as one of the greatest humanitarian achievements of the 20th century. Though most of the people think that WHO concentrates on its role primarily in controlling and ultimately eliminating infectious disease, its mandate, however, is far broader (Hope, 2010).

The United Nations has set 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with 169 targets are that all …show more content…

Since then cases have been reported in 5 additional West African countries mainly affecting Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Senegal. It was an unprecedented outbreak in its scale, severity, and complexity. Extreme poverty, weak health systems and social customs were primarily hindering the control of the virus as these factors made breaking human-to-human transmission difficult. So, it was a big challenge for both WHO and United Nations to resolve this issue. The World Health Organization in coordination with United Nations made strategies to stop all chains of transmission in the affected countries, prevent the spread of the disease to neighboring countries and to safely re-activate life-saving essential health services. The main objectives of these strategies were to stop transmission of the Ebola virus in affected countries, to prevent new outbreaks of the Ebola virus in new areas and countries, to safely reactivate essential health services and increase resilience, fast-track Ebola research and development and coordinate national and international Ebola response (WHO,