World Health Day is observed worldwide every 7th of April. Every year, World Health Day is associated with a special theme that tackles and solves a special issue related to global health. As an international observation highlighting global health awareness, it is a special day that is really worth knowing and celebrating. The theme for 2021 World Health Day is “Building a Fairer, Healthier World”.

It is no secret to all of us that Covid-19 has hit our world hard and drastically impacted our communities causing wide social and economic disparities. This has been the main reason why the World Health Organization chose this theme for this 2021 celebration. WHO noticed that the pandemic has increasingly made the world unequal in a way that there are people who continue to live healthier lives and have access to good quality health services while others struggle with poor living and health conditions, which are entirely due to the conditions in which they are born, grow, live and work. WHO thinks that this is unfair and that it must be seriously taken into consideration.

On this date, WHO is intended to organize a campaign that will highlight its constitutional principle that “the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition”. For this purpose, WHO wants leaders from all over the world to take initiative in spreading this global health awareness day through working together, collecting reliable data, tackling inequities, acting beyond borders, acting on the social determinants of health equity and gender equity through monitoring and working on human rights. These are to ensure that everyone has living and working conditions that are conducive to good health and that all people are able to access quality health services when and where they need them. Indeed, WHO defines the word health as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social wellbeing and not merely an absence of disease”; hence it is committed to ensuring that everyone, everywhere, can realize the right to good health. On this April 7, the unfolding of the entire event is going to take place online. A live video will be broadcasted by World Health Organization South-East Asia Region – WHO SEARO – with a special focus on countries in the Western Pacific which have known a rapid economic growth, migration and urbanization; yet their peoples fail to get the same opportunities to better live healthily and decently, an inequity that is especially triggered by the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic.

A brief historic on the inception of World Health Day
The 7th of April is also the anniversary of the World Health Organization founded in 1948. That year, the 1st world health assembly was held and decided to dedicate the 7th of April of each year as World Health Day. It was only in 1950 that it took effect worldwide, celebrated around a specific shared theme. The aim of WHO when creating this annual observance day is to raise awareness on a specific and meaningful health topic each year and to make this topic as a priority of concern throughout the world. If 2020 World Health Day was dedicated to the nurses and midwives who were at the forefront to cure people contracted by the coronavirus, this year, it will focus on the elimination of all kinds of inequity caused by this pandemic.

Source: World Health Organization (WHO)