In the context of current fears about swine flu, Anne Applebaum trains her eye on the World Health Organization. Her assessment of it - as of its director general, Margaret Chan - is mostly positive. Applebaum writes:
With more than 60 years' experience, and real achievements under its belt - it led the successful campaign to eliminate smallpox in the 1970s - the WHO may well be the only international organization that we cannot live without. When infectious diseases are spread rapidly across borders, WHO is expected to coordinate the scientific response of national public health officials, from France to Malaysia, as well as the global information campaign needed to explain it. No national government can do the same.
But she has some worries nonetheless: that, because it is afflicted by some of the same problems as the UN, the WHO might 'drift into irrelevance'. At least two of Applebaum's criticisms strike me as contestable.
She argues that a focus on social and economic factors connected to people's health is 'beyond the scope of an organization that should primarily be concerned with infectious diseases'. That is mere assertion unsupported by anything at all. Even if the problem of infectious diseases were agreed to be the most important priority of the WHO, this wouldn't establish that, or why, the focus upon what is and isn't conducive to health more generally should not be a significant one for the WHO.
Second, and in the same area, Applebaum speaks of 'unnecessary time' being spent producing 'papers on legally dubious notions such as the "Right to Health"'. Philosophically, it is true, there is a debate about whether the concept of rights can be extended from so-called negative rights - rights, roughly, against being attacked, interfered with, harmed, in one way and another - to entitlements of a positive kind, such as to food, education, health care and so on. Some people contend that only negative rights can truly be rights. I think that they're wrong about this but I won't argue the case here. Legally, however, there's nothing dubious about encoding rights to health, so long as this is given concrete definition - in terms of trying to guarantee some minimum conditions in people's life circumstances and the provision of health care. Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms, after all, that 'Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family[.]' That is not a meaningless commitment.
