The World Health Organization (WHO) annual conference began with calls for peace as a prerequisite for health. War, hunger and disease are friends, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told representatives of the UN’s 194 member countries in Geneva on Sunday. “The foundations of stable societies are shaken and destroyed by war even more than by pandemics.” Illness, lack of health care and psychological wounds are often the consequences of conflict.
Tedros, who is due to run for re-election as WHO director-general on Tuesday, pointed out that gun violence does not only affect people in Ukraine, but also in Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria and his conflict-ravaged home. . Ethiopia country. “I am a child of war,” Tedros said, visibly moved by his traumatic experiences.
“The medicine most needed is what the WHO cannot manage: peace,” Tedros said, after some leaders also stressed in their speeches that global security and health go hand in hand. However, they also noted that the war in Ukraine was not the only crisis that worried the WHO. French President Emmanuel Macron and other politicians called for efforts to prepare health systems and the pharmaceutical sector for future pandemics. Federal Health Minister Karl Lauterbach will deliver a speech in Geneva on Monday.
However, the most controversial topics will not be on the agenda of the WHO conference in the coming days: a possible legally binding treaty on pandemic preparedness and the search for the origin of the corona virus in China, which has been blocked by Beijing.