Excerpt from reliefweb.int
The Tongan Ministry of Health, the Pacific Community (SPC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) are jointly celebrating the 75th anniversary of WHO, marking 75 years of multilateral partnership resulting in increased access to lifesaving healthcare and improved health in the Pacific. While celebrating this milestone, the three organizations are calling on countries and partners to build on this progress and work together to tackle remaining health challenges in the Pacific.
“We must remember that this is the world’s health organization and WHO’s work is an enormous collaborative effort led by the Organization’s 194 member countries with the support of many partners and individuals across the globe. So all of us have a reason to celebrate WHO’s 75th birthday,” said the Honourable Health Minister of Tonga, Dr Saia Ma’u Piukala. “Let’s take this opportunity to recognize the 75 years of progress made in public health in the Pacific and look at how we can build upon our successes to deliver better health in future.”
Over the past 75 years, Pacific islands countries and areas (PICs) have made tremendous progress in health, in collaboration with WHO, SPC and other partners in the region. Some of these successes include:
- The elimination of yaws in all except three PICs, following extensive control efforts in the 1950s and 1960s
- Wiping out endemic poliomyelitis (polio), with the last case of indigenous wild poliovirus in the Pacific reported in 1989
- Signing of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control by all PICs by 2006
- The elimination of trachoma in Vanuatu in 2022
- The establishment or strengthening of national public health laboratories so that, by 2022, all PICs had testing capacity for COVID-19 and other diseases
- 15 PICs achieved or surpassed COVID-19 vaccination rates of over 70% of their entire populations by end of March 2023
- An increase in the total number of doctors by 119%, nurses by 14% and midwives by 48% in the Pacific over the past decade
