My internship at WHO

The World Health Organization… Who? Ok, Ok, I’ll explain you what it is, how it looks like and what I’m actually doing there.

After a long and very nice weekend, I woke up this morning for another WHO day. First I took the tram all the way up the mountain to the bus stop Nations – the place where the United Nations are located.

I then stepped into bus number 8, which brought me to OMS. And, as always, the first thing I see when I arrive are the two protesters.

Five minutes later I step into ‘my’ huge building.

I go to the L-building, 4^th floor. It’s damn hot inside… but according to the other persons working at my department is it still quiet ok. During the summer it can sometimes get 40 degrees inside because – as healthy and environmentally-thinking as they are – they don’t have air conditioning…

The corridor and my room of today (every day I’m in another room since I don’t have my own desk…):

After a short coffee break I am ready to start my day. Time to start working…

In short, the WHO consists of several clusters; Health Security & Environment is one of them. This cluster is further divided into divisions, and I am working for the department of Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response. Everybody at the corridor that you just saw on the picture is working for this department, but there are sub-divisions... (still following my story?). I am involved in the communication part of the International Health Regulations.

So as all these difficult names are implying – The department is working on Global security by preventing, detecting or assessing the outbreak of new diseases. For instance: SARS. To be able to detect a new outbreak or the existence of a new disease as fast as possible, they have set up the International Health Regulations. It’s like a huge framework that is in touch with all the 194 States Parties of the WHO. When something, either disease-like, or nuclear or toxic or whatsoever, has an outbreak in one of these countries, they will contact WHO directly and like this there will be a global response that tries to solve the problem.

Last week I read quiet a lot of articles, and it's actually pretty scary how easy it is for a new disease to evolve and to become epidemic. For instance, did you know that every year (!) a new disease develops?! And considering influenza, it is just a matter of time till this virus transforms into a version that we don't have a vaccine for yet. And if a certain disease thus gets the chance to evolve, it can so easily and so fast be spread around the whole world. Because we are all traveling by airplanes, food is distributed from all over the world, etc... Anyway, I think it is an interesting area to work in for three months :)

Although at the moment I am still not 100% sure of what I will be doing. But last week I have for instance written ‘talking points’ for journalists. In other words: They had two reports - written in very sophisticated English – and it was my task to transform these into popular and more understandable English so that journalists would understand what the reports were about. Like this they will be able to ask questions and thus: ‘talk’ about the ‘points’ raised in the reports.

For the rest, I am preparing some things for the World Health Assembly, which will be held next week. The Assembly is like big meeting whereby delegations from all Member States come to Geneva to discuss the Organization’s policies, the budget and to approve the WHO programme. As you can imagine, an exciting week, with a lot of important persons walking around from all over the world and… I will be there! Our department has a stand during this Assembly week, and I will be standing next to it during 3 out of the 5 days!

More exciting things that I will do: This coming Sunday I have to work. But I don’t mind, because it will be very interesting! There will be a workshop hold about “Making Global Health News”. Basically it’s about how to translate all these difficult World Health Assembly agenda issues into something more understandable for journalists and the media. My supervisor asked the organizer if I could be one of the participants as well, and guess what… I am on the list! Today I received this list of participants and it kinda looks like this:

Ms blabla – Chief Editor
Mr blabla – Policy Officer
Ms blabla – Executive Director
Mrs blabla – Head communications
Mr blabla – President
Yoline Kuipers – intern

Persons from Switzerland, Ghana, France, England, US, Nigeria etc, etc, will all be there. And right in the middle, sitting in between all these important persons, you will find me. The intern from Holland! I'm looking forwards to it!

xY