World Health Organization: a primer [Effect Measure]

Over the years we’ve written quite a bit (well over 3000 posts) here and on the old site at blogger.com. Some of them have been ephemeral comments, some of them whimsical and but many of them dealing with serious topics that couldn’t be accommodated in the format of a single blog post. The ones explaining new results in influenza science sometimes take three or four installments. We’ve done a 17 part series giving a paragraph by paragraph, equation by equation explanation of a paper on mathematical modeling antiviral use in influenza for non technical readers, and another 17 parter on the basic ideas of cognitive linguist George Lakoff’s ideas and how they might (or might not) relate to health (first post here, links to the next at the bottom of each succeeding one). These long series have been failures as far as garnering a big readership but one of our motives here has always been to further our own thinking about things. All the Reveres subscribe to an adage we teach our students: “writing is thinking.”

Below are links to a slightly more modest series from three years ago that is still extremely pertinent, given the current pandemic. It was our attempt to explain what the World Health Organization (WHO) was, is, and most important, isn’t. There is a general (mistaken) impression that WHO is some kind of world governmental agency or an international regulatory body. It is neither because the “international system,” as it has existed for three or more centuries, does not permit that. The existing international system is anarchic in the technical sense, which we explain in this five parter on WHO:

• part I: 300 years old at birth
• part II: Westphalian public health
• part III: the world changes
• part IV: one door closes, another door opens
• part V: end of the beginning

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