Commission pushes global health board, resists WHO-FAO merger

An expert group consulted by the World Health Organization on how Europe and the world can better prepare for the next health emergency has proposed the creation of several new entities while resisting calls to merge existing ones.

Among the recommendations from the Pan-European Commission on Health and Sustainable Development, chaired by former Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti, was the creation of a global health board, a Pan-European network for disease control, and a Pan-European health threats council.

The proposed global health board is intended to work under the G-20 group of nations to coordinate health, economic, and financial policies within governments and internationally, the commission said in a report released last week. And Monti told reporters that the Italian presidency of the G-20 has already “advanced quite a bit in achieving consensus on this” after the commission floated the idea earlier this year.

According to the report, the new entity should be charged with “identifying failures in the provision of global public goods for health and marshalling support from the international community to remedy those failures, assessing risk and ensuring preparedness and responsiveness.”

One of the 19 commissioners, Suma Chakrabarti, told Devex by email that the idea is to bring together finance and health policymakers to “effectively coordinate financing for global public goods for health and [ensure] we go beyond boom and bust cycles of funding for pandemic preparedness and response.”

Meanwhile, creating a Pan-European network for disease control and a Pan-European health threats council would “put in place the structures needed for a better coordinated response across the European and Central Asian regions, and to maintain political focus on pandemic and health threat preparedness across the region,” added Chakrabarti, who is also chair of the Overseas Development Institute’s board of trustees and former president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

The commission backed a global pandemic treaty — whose merits will be discussed at a special session of the World Health Assembly in November — and quotas to ensure representation of women on public bodies developing and implementing health policy.

Martin McKee, chair of the commission’s scientific advisory board, told reporters that the most important recommendation is to embed the concept of “one health” — recognizing the importance of addressing threats to human health but also plants, animals, and the environment — at all levels.

This will require better coordination and collaboration among international agencies, such as WHO, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the United Nations Environment Programme, and the World Organisation for Animal Health, also known as OIE. But the commission stopped short of recommending a merger of some of these institutions, as had been advocated by some members.

Chakrabarti told Devex that WHO, FAO, and OIE need to develop a shared mechanism for establishing priorities, common language, responsibilities, and areas of joint work.

“But ultimately each of these organisations has responsibilities beyond those that intersect and has its own policy and knowledge community to work with and bring to the One Health table — and a full merger could make it harder rather than easier to bring all these domains together,” he wrote.

“We also felt that a massive organisational restructure and all the focus that would need, and disruption it would cause, would be a distraction from more fundamental priorities of overcoming the current crisis and putting in place better structures and stronger systems to deal with the next one,” he added.