Days Until World Health Day

About World Health Day

April 7 marks the World Health Organization's own 1948 founding anniversary, and has been observed annually since 1950 to draw attention to a specific global health topic chosen each year.

As one of several official WHO-sponsored health days throughout the year, it's typically the most prominent, often accompanied by global health reports, campaigns, and events tied to that year's chosen theme.

Each year's WHO-chosen theme has ranged widely, from universal health coverage to mental health to, in the organization's founding decades, the eradication of specific infectious diseases then still widespread. Smallpox eradication, certified complete in 1980, remains the clearest example of a WHO-coordinated campaign whose success is directly tied to messaging the observance has echoed in later decades.

The WHO's constitution, whose 1948 founding this day commemorates, defines health broadly as "a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being," a definition still widely cited and occasionally debated in public health circles today.