UN health agency gains added powers to confront deadly new diseases

Confronted with the rapid emergence and spread of the deadly new Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the United Nations World Health Organization’s (WHO) annual meeting today granted the agency additional powers to respond to new health threats, including on-the-spot investigations, enhanced communications and broader sources of reporting.

"This is an extremely significant step for international public health," WHO Director-General Gro Harlem Brundtland said of the resolution, adopted by the World Health Assembly (WHA) – the WHO's annual meeting – in Geneva. “SARS has shown us the size of the challenges we face. These new measures will help us respond even more effectively to the next public health threat."

The resolution confirms and underlines WHO’s authority to verify disease outbreaks from all available official and unofficial sources, and, when necessary to determine the severity of an outbreak through on-the-spot investigations to ensure it is appropriately controlled.

The resolution is a major step in the ongoing revision of the International Health Regulations, which were first published in 1969. The Regulations, which currently limit mandatory reporting to just a few diseases, reflect the world at the time they were written and have not kept pace with the way WHO or the rest of the world now works.

The process of revising these regulations has been placed on a strong footing by the Assembly, which has also urged all Member States to establish an improved system to ensure rapid two-way communication between WHO and the national authorities.

Since it first emerged in China’s Guangdong Province in November, SARS has spread rapidly in Southeast Asia, including Hong Kong and Taiwan Province, and as far afield as Toronto in Canada. But it was only first identified as a new disease in March. As of yesterday, a total of 8,221 probable SARS cases with 735 deaths had been reported from 28 countries.