WHO on Health and Economic Productivity

The current issue of the World Health Organization's annual flagship publication, titled The World Health Report 1999: Making a Difference, is the first issued under Gro Harlem Brundtland, WHO's Director‐General, who assumed the office in 1998. In her preface to the 121‐page report Dr. Brundtland identifies four major challenges to be addressed in order to improve the world's health: the need to reduce the burden of excess mortality and morbidity suffered by the poor; the need to counter potential threats to health resulting from economic crises, unhealthy environments, or risky behavior; the need to develop more effective health systems; and finally the need to invest in expanding the knowledge base that made possible the twentieth‐century revolution in health. Chapter 1 of the report discusses health and development; subsequent chapters address the problems of emerging epidemics and infectious diseases and of maternal and child disability and mortality; health systems development; and the challenges of rolling back malaria and combating the tobacco epidemic. Chapter 1 consists of two parts: the first documents the twentieth‐century revolution in human health, the second discusses the inadequately explored problem of the relationship between health and economic productivity. This second section of Chapter 1 is reproduced below in full, with the permission of WHO. (The endnotes were renumbered.)