Promote health, keep the world safe, serve the vulnerable" in the Eastern Mediterranean Region (Editorial).

23 May 2018 will be remembered as an important day in the history of the World Health Organization (WHO) and global health. It was the day when the 194 Member States that constitute the World Health Assembly (WHA) - the highest decision-making body of WHO, making it effectively the global parliament for health - unanimously adopted the thirteenth general programme of work (GPW 13) for the Organization, covering the next five years (2019-2003). In its 70 years of existence, WHO has already seen 12 GPWs, but GPW 13 marks a new departure in many ways, heralding the Organization's entry into a new era of work with new ways of tackling the task of improving people's health and well-being across the globe.

World Health Organization Joint External Evaluations in the Eastern Mediterranean Region, 2016-17.

By 2014, only 33% of countries had self-reported compliance with the International Health Regulations (2005), including 8 countries from the Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR). During the Ebola epidemic, the discovery of a gap between objective assessment and self-reports for certain IHR capacities prompted the World Health Organization (WHO) to review and update the IHR monitoring and evaluation framework to include a voluntary objective review process, called Joint External Evaluation (JEE), that did not exist before. The regional committee for the EMR approved the JEE and encouraged its 21 member states to volunteer for reviews.