World Health Day

It is celebrated each year on April 7 to mark the anniversary of the creation of the World Health Organization (WHO), and provides an opportunity to mobilize action around a public health theme that concerns the whole world.

What is it?

World Health Day is a global health awareness day celebrated annually on April 7, sponsored by the World Health Organization (WHO), as well as other related organizations. The first World Health Assembly decided to observe World Health Day on April 7 each year, starting in 1950. This Day marks the founding of the WHO and helps draw the world’s attention to a subject of major importance in connection with health.

World Health Day is one of eight annual global campaigns highlighted by WHO, along with World Tuberculosis Day, World Immunization Week, World Malaria Day, World No Tobacco Day, World AIDS Day, World Blood Donor Day and World Hepatitis Day.

What is health?

The definition of health is very broad. According to the World Health Organization, a healthy person is in a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, which is not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

ADDRESSING INEQUALITY IN ACCESS TO CARE WORLDWIDE

If for several decades, we observe that the average global life expectancy is increasing, inequalities in health remain very significant throughout the world. Especially since, according to the WHO, and as World Health Day reminds us, health “does not consist only in the absence of disease or infirmity” but more in “a state of complete well-being physical, mental and social. A state that is difficult to achieve in countries marked by conflict and war, with hostile climatic and geographical environments. Countries where the population is often affected by poverty and where dysfunctions in health systems persist.

CHILDREN, FIRST VICTIMS OF MALFUNCTIONS IN HEALTH SYSTEMS

Of these inequalities, children are the first victims. Indeed, one of the latest reports from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) shows that more than 8 out of 10 stillbirths (birth of an infant with no sign of life at 28 weeks of pregnancy or more) occur in middle- and low-income countries. A situation that tends to worsen due to the Covid-19 epidemic. Indeed, disrupted by the pandemic, health services are currently saturated and forced to give priority to patients with coronavirus, sometimes at the expense of prenatal and pediatric services.