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World Health Assembly Opens

Health

by  |  on May 17th, 2010  |  0 comments

Today marks the opening session of the WHO’s World Health Assembly, the 63rd of its kind.  As the decision-making body of the WHO, the assembly meets annually to convene the health ministers of the 193 member states, approve the budget and appoint the Director General.  Top of the agenda this year is H1N1, which has been the cause of nearly 18,000 deaths; alcohol and its abuse, as well as progress on the Millennium Development Goals, are also prominent on the agenda.  Some pre-Assembly controversy was stirred in South Africa when health minister Aaron Motsoaledi made a statement in Cape Town about proposing a global ban on formula feeding.  A parallel initiative, dubbed the World Open Health Assembly, is making the proceedings open to the public via Twitter.

 

Author

Cynthia Schweer Rayner

Cynthia Schweer Rayner is an independent consultant and philanthropy advisor specializing in public health, social entrepreneurship and scalable business models for positive social change. As a recovering management consultant, she spent several months living in South Africa, and later co-founded the US branch of an organization providing support to orphaned and vulnerable children. In 2009, she was an LGT Venture Philanthropy Fellow, working with mothers2mothers (m2m), a multinational non-profit organization employing mothers living with HIV as peer educators to positive pregnant women. She currently works with individuals, companies and nonprofits to finance and develop models for positive change. Cynthia has an MBA from INSEAD and a BA in English Literature from Georgetown University. She currently lives in Cape Town and visits New York frequently, where she co-owns a Manhattan-based yoga studio, mang'Oh yoga (www.mangohstudio.com).


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