The World's Health

Sixty or more countries celebrated World Health Day last week. No bugles blared to mark the second birthday of the United Nations' World Health Organization. But in Terai, in the far-off foothills of the Himalayas, members of a WHO team journeyed by elephant from village to village, crawled into thatched huts spraying DDT to fight an outbreak of malaria. WHO workers were aboard river boats plying the Rhine from the North Sea to Switzerland, giving boatmen examinations and treatments for venereal diseases which had been, carried from country to country. In Shanghai, a WHO nurse kept up a tuberculosis nursing program that had been started long before the Red armies overran China.

All over Europe, WHO teams were carrying out the largest immunization program in history in an effort to cut down the ravages of tuberculosis. So far, almost 10 million children have been given BCG vaccine. The campaign has begun in Africa, the Near East and the Orient; eventually, 40 to 50 million children will be inoculated.

Canadian Psychiatrist Brock Chisholm, WHO's director general, has no notion that his organization can ever become a worldwide health department. Instead, he would like it to set a good example. (In Greece it did an outstanding job of malaria control, and the example inspired scores of Greeks to take training in malariology.) Every day WHO headquarters in Geneva sends out word of outbreaks of the five "treaty diseases" (plague, cholera, typhus, smallpox and yellow fever) against which quarantine officials must be alert. This work is more than ever important now that air travelers can spread a plague halfway around the world in half a day.-

WHO's activities are limited to projects of the task-force type because it lacks money to do more. Though it has 62 member nations (the Russians and three satellites have huffily announced their resignations), its budget is only $6,300,000 this year.

-Last week WHO warned the world of smallpox in Glasgow. Travelers from Scotland were quarantined in New York unless newly vaccinated.

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