A World Health Mandate

Abstract

Primary health care is neither easily accessible for the majority of the world’s people, nor are there services on which to depend. Despite the fact that the World Health Organization proposed a goal of “Health for All by the Year 2000,” which virtually every provider of health care in the world espoused, the closer we come to the target date, global statistics and trends do not give much cause for hope. Malnutrition is increasing, rather than decreasing throughout the world, safe water is not available to seventy-two percent of the lowest income countries, and the mortality rates are staggering in many African, Asian, and Latin American nations.

By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with … the earth and the wonders thereof — the sea — the sun.

Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923)