All people need food. Unsafe foods; however, may cause diseases ranging from diarrhea to cancer. Chemicals in food are a worldwide health concern. In 2006, the World Health Organization (WHO) organized a consultation on the global burden of foodborne diseases. Work to estimate this burden began in 2007 and was carried out by the WHO Foodborne Disease Burden Epidemiology Reference Group (FERG), ...

Chronic conditions are increasingly the primary concern of health care systems throughout the world. In response to this challenge, the World Health Organization has joined with the MacColl Institute for Healthcare Innovation to adapt the Chronic Care Model (CCM) from a global perspective. The resultant effort is the Innovative Care for Chronic Conditions (ICCC) framework which expands communit...

BACKGROUND Many low-and middle-income countries (LMIC) of the World Health Organization (WHO) European Region have introduced social health insurance payroll taxes after the political transition in the late 1980s, combined with budget transfers to allow for exempting specific population groups from paying contributions, such as those outside formal sector work and in particular vulnerable group...

The Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) stands as a landmark approach to addressing a global health problem. It represents the first time the World Health Organization (WHO) used its constitutional right to negotiate an international law and the first time the Member States of WHO agreed to a collective response to chronic, non-communicable diseases. This paper draws lessons from the...

The World Health Organization (WHO) has used econometric methods to measure the efficiency of health care systems. We assess the robustness of WHO results to definitions of efficiency and statistical procedures. Originally analysed by the WHO, the data are for 1997 (50 countries) and 1993-1997 (141 countries). The efficiency of each country in promoting population health is estimated after taki...

The world’s population of people aged over 60 will double from 11% in 2006 to 22% by 2050. Even more dramatic will be the growth in the number of the very old. Between 1950 and 2050, the number of people over the age of 80 will grow from 14 million to 400 million worldwide. At the same time, the pace of urbanization continues unabated: by 2030 an estimated three in five people will be urban dwe...

Age-friendliness, promoted by the World Health Organization (WHO), aims to enable and support individuals in different aspects of life for fostering life satisfaction and personal well-being as they age. We identified specific aspect(s) of age-friendliness associated with life satisfaction and examined similarities and differences in age-friendliness and life satisfaction in young-old and old-o...

In the UK, government has committed itself to improving health and reducing inequalities in health. For the first time, issues such as food poverty will be addressed by tackling the causes of poverty and wider determinants of ill health. The time has never been better, therefore, for health and local authorities to work collaboratively to promote and improve health. Community involvement is als...

EVIPNet (Evidence-Informed Policy Network) Africa—a network of World Health Organization (WHO)-sponsored knowledge-translation (KT) platforms in seven sub-Saharan African countries—was launched at a meeting in Brazzaville, Congo, in March 2006 (1;2). EVIPNet Africa can trace its origins to resolutions from both the Ministerial Summit on Health Research (November 2004) and the World Health Assem...