Vital global health needs.

The July cover of AJN shows a nurse-midwife counseling a new mother in Ghana. We obtained this photograph from Jhpiego, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that has been providing health services for women and families in developing countries since 1974. Not only does this image pay tribute to the Year of the Nurse and Midwife, but it’s a reminder that though the world’s attention is focused on the mounting cases of COVID-19, other vital global health care needs deserve our attention and our support. Infant and maternal mortality; communicable diseases like TB, Ebola, and malaria; and health crises arising from disasters, poverty, and war don’t pause while we deal with this outbreak.

A stunning departure.

I’m still in disbelief that the United States has given the World Health Organization (WHO) notice that it is pulling out of the organization. In May, the White House threatened to cut funding and leave, claiming that the WHO favored China and thus mishandled the COVID-19 outbreak (this was after praising them in April). This week, the United States confirmed it will leave the WHO. A global pandemic hardly seems the time to stop collaborating with other countries as the whole planet seeks solutions to combat this new and deadly coronavirus.

The United States: there from the start.

The United States had a prominent role in the formation of the WHO, which was founded shortly after the United Nations as the agency to coordinate global health. Frank Calderone, a U.S. public health physician, was director of the headquarters office of the WHO Interim Commission. He detailed the mission and early work of the newly forming health organization in an article, “The Health of All Peoples,” in the January 1948 issue of AJN. (click on the pdf version to read) He cited policy from the preamble to the new organization:

“The achievement of any state in the protection and promotion of health is of value to all. Unequal development in different countries in the promotion of health and control of disease, especially communicable disease, is a common danger.”

I am profoundly sorry that our leaders have made this decision to take a divisive stance at a critical time—one when we should all be pulling together. Isolationism is not a realistic option in this age of global transportation and international migration, when one can travel to any part of the globe in the space of 24 hours. The speed at which this pandemic swept across the world should remind us that the health of any of us depends on the health of all of us.