World Health Day 2008 Focuses on Climate Change

The World Health Organization (WHO) celebrated World Health Day on 7 April 2008 under the theme “Protecting health from climate change.” WHO selected this theme in recognition of the diverse threats to global public health security that climate warming poses, including the changing dynamics of infectious diseases outbreaks; the recurrence of natural disasters; and intensification of deforestation, floods and desertification.

To mark the occasion, WHO Director-General Margaret Chan stressed that “climate change threatens to reverse progress in fighting diseases of poverty, and to widen the gaps in health outcomes between the richest and the poorest.”

http://www.who.int/world-health-day/en/index.html