Charting a Future for Health in the Americas. Quadrennial Report of the Director. Centennial Edition

Abstract

When the American republics founded the Pan American Health Organization in 1902, they reified a collective hemispheric vision that, together, they could improve health throughout the Region. Over the century—across an arc of time and space punctuated by world wars, economic crises, and political upheavals— a Pan American commitment to enhance the well-being of individuals, families, communities, and nations has sustained the Organization. In celebrating its 100th anniversary, the Pan American Health Organization— already the oldest international public health entity in the world—joins a select group of institutions that have stood the test of time. With its centenarian counterparts, PAHO shares two strengths: a bedrock foundation and an uncommon ability to negotiate dramatic environmental changes. Those strengths, in turn, have enabled the Organization to pursue its primary purpose: service to the countries of the Americas to better the health of their peoples. Charting a Future for Health in the Americas describes the work of the Pan American Health Organization in recent years. The report opens with a disquisition on the significance of its title—how PAHO has had, and will continue to need, to chart and steer a steady course, dealing with and even capitalizing on changes along the way, in order to reach its goal: health in the Americas. With pointillistic highlights of the Organization’s century-long work in its major fields of responsibility, the report brings the accounting of its actions to the present. It describes the resources PAHO has employed and the impact its cooperation with member countries has had on assessing the regional health situation, enhancing health and human development, preventing and controlling diseases, promoting health, protecting the environment, and strengthening health systems and services. Moreover, because of the stature it has attained, the Organization has been able to strike alliances with other international agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and the private sector—and the story of their shared agenda is recounted here. This, then, is the latest in a series of reports of progress in public health throughout the Americas and, at the same time, of the work of an organization built to last.