Understanding global security - Peter Hough

HEALTH THREATS TO SECURITY
The four Conventions were merged into a single International Sanitary
Convention in 1903 and the seeds of today’s global health polity were sown with
the emergence of the International Sanitary Bureau in the USA (later to become the
Pan American Health Organization, now the World Health Organization’s arm
for the Americas) and the intensification of talks for a global IGO for public health.
In 1907 L’Office Internationale d’Hygiene Publique (OIHP) was agreed on, with
a Parisian headquarters, permanent staff and a decision-making body made up of
(eventually) representatives of over 50 governments and colonial administrations.
The OIHP sought to disseminate medical information as well as codifying quarantine
agreements and expanding the scope of the International Sanitary Convention.
The OIHP continued to function despite the creation of a new global health
organization as part of the League of Nations system established after the First World
War. The Health Organization of the League of Nations (HOLN) was established amid
the carnage of typhus, cholera and influenza epidemics that dwarfed even the horrors
of the world’s greatest ever military conflict which had prompted the creation of
the League and the implementation of the concept of collective military security. The
OIHP continued to have authority over the International Sanitary Conventions (which
were expanded by conventions for smallpox and typhus in 1926 and for aerial transport
in 1935) while the HOLN focused on advising particular countries on containing
the spread of epidemics and set up specialist commissions of experts to coordinate
information and advice for governments to utilize in dealing with particular diseases.
Hence, in 1923 a Malaria Commission and a Cancer Commission were established.
The HOLN’s role decreased sharply at the outset of the Second World War as
the whole League project crumbled in the face of a pronounced failure of collective
military security. The League’s well-documented peacekeeping failings, however,
detract from the fact that the HOLN (and other specialized agencies) had proved
quite successful. The HOLN had succeeded in containing the spread of typhus from
East Europe in the first year of its operation in 1921 and fostered the development
of an international ‘epistemic community’ of health specialists who, undoubtedly,
contributed to the rapid improvement in human health standards throughout the
world in the twentieth century.
During the Second World War a new international body was set up to offer
humanitarian assistance to countries on the cessation of fighting. The United Nations
Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) started operations ahead of the
rest of the planned United Nations system set to replace the League of Nations at
the full conclusion of the war. From 1944 to 1946 UNRRA supplied food and equipment
to countries where fighting had stopped and in many cases this came to be
accompanied by medical personnel and drugs for countries racked with disease.
A 1946 cholera outbreak in China, for example, was brought under control by the
supply of an effective vaccine from the USA. UNRRA also assumed control from
the OIHP (which continued to exist until officially absorbed by the World Health
Organization) for administering the International Sanitary Conventions.
UNRRA, however, was only ever intended to be a temporary programme and
it was wound up in 1946 when its work was considered to be complete. The 1945 San
Francisco Conference which founded the United Nations system did not envisage
a successor to the HOLN, but a resolution of the first UN General Assembly in 1946
paved the way for the creation of the World Health Organization.
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