World Health Organization

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The United Nations specialised agency for public health, founded in 1948 and headquartered in Geneva. Two of its functions matter to this Journey. It ran the Intensified Smallpox Eradication Programme from 1967, which is the only completed eradication of a human disease and the only unambiguous case of a deliberate intervention removing a major cause of death permanently. And it produces the Global Health Estimates, the series from which life expectancy and healthy life expectancy at global and country level are conventionally quoted — including the paired figures that make the lifespan-versus-healthspan gap measurable at all. Its estimates are modelled rather than directly observed for most of the world, since fewer than half of deaths globally are registered with a certified cause; the uncertainty in a single-country HALE figure is often larger than the differences being discussed.