Geneva, 21 January 2025 – The World Health Organization (WHO) has expressed deep regret following the announcement of the United States’ intent to withdraw from the organization. News Update: United States Announces Intent to Withdraw from World Health Organization
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In an official statement, the WHO underscored the critical role it plays in safeguarding global health, addressing disease outbreaks, and strengthening health systems worldwide, including in the United States. The organization highlighted the historic collaboration between the WHO and the United States, which has spanned over seven decades. Together, they have achieved significant milestones, such as eradicating smallpox and nearly eliminating polio.
The statement emphasized the contributions of American institutions to WHO initiatives, noting the mutual benefits derived from this partnership. WHO also referenced the transformative reforms undertaken over the past seven years, aimed at increasing accountability, cost-effectiveness, and impact in member states, with the active participation of the United States.
Expressing hope for continued dialogue, the WHO called on the United States to reconsider its decision, emphasizing the shared goal of promoting global health and well-being.
WHO Origin and founding
The International Sanitary Conferences (ISC), the first of which was held on 23 June 1851, were a series of conferences that took place until 1938, about 87 years. The first conference, in Paris, was almost solely concerned with cholera, which would remain the disease of major concern for the ISC for most of the 19th century. With the cause, origin, and communicability of many epidemic diseases still uncertain and a matter of scientific argument, international agreement on appropriate measures was difficult to reach. Seven of these international conferences, spanning 41 years, were convened before any resulted in a multi-state international agreement. The seventh conference, in Venice in 1892, finally resulted in a convention. It was concerned only with the sanitary control of shipping traversing the Suez Canal, and was an effort to guard against importation of cholera.
Five years later, in 1897, a convention concerning the bubonic plague was signed by sixteen of the nineteen states attending the Venice conference. While Denmark, Sweden-Norway, and the US did not sign this convention, it was unanimously agreed that the work of the prior conferences should be codified for implementation. Subsequent conferences, from 1902 until the final one in 1938, widened the diseases of concern for the ISC, and included discussions of responses to yellow fever, brucellosis, leprosy, tuberculosis, and typhoid. In part as a result of the successes of the Conferences, the Pan-American Sanitary Bureau (1902), and the Office International d’Hygiène Publique or “International office of Public Hygiene” in english(1907) were soon founded. When the League of Nations was formed in 1920, it established the Health Organization of the League of Nations. After World War II, the United Nations absorbed all the other health organizations, to form the WHO.
