Today, I am thankful for those global organizations that make a difference in protecting humanity.
On our planet of 7 billion people, it’s challenging, if not impossible, to get the vast majority to agree on anything. However, one basic principle to which we can all espouse is the belief that every person who is brought into this world deserves the chance to live a long, healthy life. A robust public health policy ensures the preservation of every adult and child, as well as future generations to follow. The wellbeing of all of humanity is crucial to ensuring the planet will be around for our descendants long after we are gone.
Global health is not a novel concept. Throughout time, the world has witnessed the devastation of disease. Despite the rise of the glorious Golden Age of Greece in the 5th Century BC, typhoid fever would ultimately lead to Athens’s downfall. The ‘pestilence’ of bubonic plague would kill more than 100 million people across Europe and Asia in the 14th Century. More recently, the influenza pandemic of 1918 resulted in nearly 100 million deaths. Despite all our wonderful technologies and the marvels of modern medicine, we still live in a tenuous world, where new pandemics, such as HIV, Ebola, and the more recent coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) can cast a hefty toll. Even long-known infectious pathogens for which we have treatment options, such as tuberculosis and diarrheal diseases (such as cholera and typhoid), continue to afflict us, still ranking in the top 10 causes of death worldwide.
So, today, I wanted to take a moment to pay homage to an organization whose sole purpose is to promote international public health. The World Health Organization (WHO), which was founded on this day (April 7) in 1948, has played a massive role over the last 8 decades to improve societal wellbeing. Since its inception, the WHO has supported the eradication of smallpox, curbed the spread of HIV, and helped curtail the mortality tied to measles.
More recently, they have been instrumental in addressing the Ebola epidemic. In the midst of the largest epidemic of Ebola (in 2014-2016), which inflicted over 28,000 and killed over 11,000 individuals in Western Africa, the WHO spearheaded a large study in Guinea using a novel vaccine to try to prevent future cases of Ebola disease. Ebola Ca Suffit, which translates brilliantly to “Ebola, that’s enough”, was an elegantly designed ring vaccination trial led by the WHO, wherein all subjects who had Ebola disease were carefully evaluated to identify all their recent contacts and the contacts of those recent contacts. All the individuals tied to a single person (i.e., contacts and contacts of contacts) with Ebola made up a cluster. The Ebola Ca Suffit study would ultimately randomize 185 different clusters (involving ~12,000 individuals) either to immediate vaccination at randomization or delayed vaccination 21 days following randomization to determine whether the vaccine could prevent new cases of Ebola. Amazingly, the study demonstrated that those receiving the Ebola vaccine in the immediate vaccination group had no cases of EBD, as compared to 10-16 cases of EBD observed in various populations of subjects included in the delayed vaccination group. In essence, the vaccine demonstrated 100% observed efficacy. This study has been instrumental in supporting the recent approval of the first Ebola vaccine. Even to this day, the WHO continues to address the lingering epidemic of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Despite intermittent military strife, the WHO is doing all it can to protect the health of the world.
We should all take a moment to pause today to express our thanks for all the WHO does to address public health. WHO not only addresses the myriad of infectious diseases that plague the world (including the SARS-CoV-2 virus that has caused the COVID-19 pandemic), they tackle non-communicable diseases, such as ischemic heart disease and chronic lung disease. They even combat societal scourges such as pollution, climate change, and vulnerable health systems.
The WHO has changed the world for the better. For this, I am most grateful to all its 8,500 employees. Thank you!
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