Why WHO matters

My friend from WHO, Rafael Bengoa, has a powerful slide that shows severely underweight children side by side with obese children. This is the double health burden of many developing countries. Peter Sims from Papua New Guinea describes how his country “still has a severe burden of acute infectious disease—malaria, tuberculosis, measles, pneumonia—and ever increasing rates of diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular disease” (p 165). He describes too how health professionals are not prepared to go into the unsanitary settlements of Port Moresby, the capital city, because “they are attacked or murdered, and women nurses are raped.”

The health problems of the developing world …