Agenda UV

Title: From disaster to cooperation: the paradoxical role of World War I in international public health

By all means World War I was a human disaster. It has been estimated than sixteen million people died as a direct result of the war; of all these victims, seven million were civilians. And all these must be added to the collateral victims, i.e., all those people who died because of the events or illnesses that would not have happened without the calamities of the war. Among others, there is the Spanish flu, which killed between 50 and 100 million people, the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War, and a horrible typhus pandemic in Russia and Poland. Besides that, it was war brutality that gave birth to strong nationalism: the use of chemical weapons, trench war and the length of the conflict favoured the demonization of opponents. The amount of material damage limited medical cooperation.

Therefore, it was an unfavourable context for international cooperation in health matters. However, in 1920, the Council of the Nations League, which was just created, created a Committee against Typhus. This Committee provided necessary clothing, soap, medication and medical equipment, ambulances, food for the hospitals that were in charge and, in some cases, full equipment. Furthermore, it assisted to quarantine stations and the building and maintenance of cleaning and disinfecting facilities.

Ironically enough, both things were related: while war brutality pushed back cooperation, the menace of the pandemics made necessary for both sides of the war to hold negotiations in order to handle the harm. Additionally, the trauma of the war gave birth to the first international organisation for peace, thing that the League of Nations could not achieve. War was an important element that contributed to the creation of medical cooperation infrastructures that are expanding still today.