Founding of the World Health Organization

The proposal came from Brazil and China. At the 1945 conference in San Francisco that founded the United Nations, their delegates called for an international health organization, and an International Health Conference met in New York from 19 June to 22 July 1946 to write its constitution.

Representatives of 51 members of the United Nations and of 10 other nations signed the text on 22 July 1946. It could take effect only after 26 UN member states had ratified it, which took until 7 April 1948. The date is now kept each year as World Health Day.

The constitution opened with a broad definition. Health, it said, was a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. The New York conference also gave the organization's Interim Commission the job of preparing the next revision of the international lists of causes of death and of drawing up lists of causes of illness, the work that became the International Classification of Diseases.

The first World Health Assembly opened in Geneva on 24 June 1948, with delegations from 53 of the 55 member states. That year the assembly endorsed the report of the Sixth Revision Conference, held in Paris in April 1948, and adopted WHO Regulations No. 1 to guide member states in compiling mortality and morbidity statistics. The sixth revision extended the classification from causes of death to diseases and injuries in general, and brought in an international form of medical certificate of cause of death.