Abstract
Achieving good health is a constant struggle and, as this book’s survey of the WHO’s activities reveals, it is made no less difficult at the global level. Since the organization’s creation in 1948 the WHO secretariat has adopted a number of methods and approaches to fulfil its overriding mandate to assist the attainment of the highest possible level of health for all peoples. The eradication of disease — particularly the infectious kind — is fundamental to that objective, existing as the precondition to the WHO’s definition of health. Further reflecting the importance of this central mission, the IO’s founders imbued the organization with considerable authority and autonomy to affect its disease eradication mandate. Over the years the WHO secretariat has sought to accomplish this assigned task by instituting a series of global disease eradication campaigns and establishing multiple disease eradication and/or control programmes. The lessons that the IO — and particularly its senior leadership — learned from these campaigns subsequently informed the organization’s classical approach to disease eradication. Yet as the world continued to change and globalize, and member states continued to shirk their responsibilities in reporting disease outbreaks, the WHO was forced to adapt its methods and approach.
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© 2015 Adam Kamradt-Scott
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Kamradt-Scott, A. (2015). Concluding Remarks. In: Managing Global Health Security. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520166_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520166_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-35043-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-52016-6
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