The World Health Organization serves as the coordinating body for virtually all the world’s ministries of health. It sets guidelines and standards, publishes recommended approaches, acts as an advisory group. It’s where all the information about health and a lot of the complaints go, and it performs some crucial functions well, such as the collection and dissemination of worldwide epidemiological data. But it is perennially short of money, and like most parts of the United Nations it is infamously, inevitably, tangled in bureaucracy. It has a tendency to freeze in the face of controversy. The
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