WHO gives clean bill of health to cities taking action on preventable diseases

This article is published in association with United Nations.

Three cities that share a healthy vision for their residents won UN World Health Organization awards on Thursday for their smoke-free parks, clean air initiatives and obesity-busting school lunch initiatives.

Córdoba in Argentina, Fortaleza in Brazil and Manchester in the UK picked up accolades at a healthy cities summit, co-hosted by the UN World Health Organization (WHO), Bloomberg Philanthropies and Vital Strategies.

The Argentinian city won recognition for its policy to eliminate sugary and artificially sweetened drinks – along with ultra-processed foods – from all schools by 2026. So far, 15,000 primary schoolchildren in 26 schools have benefited.

“We’re seeing a lot of progress in local leadership and mayors from across the world taking on the fight and trying to lower rates of the world’s biggest killers, heart disease, diabetes, cancers and respiratory diseases,” said Jaimie Guerra, Communications Officer at WHO.

The Summit in Paris brought togethers mayors and officials from 61 cities around the world to discuss how to build healthier local communities.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus congratulated the three winners, who he said were a model for other cities to follow, at the forefront of the fight against non-communicable diseases and injuries.

Non-communicable illnesses include heart disease, cancer, diabetes and chronic respiratory disease. They are responsible for the vast majority of fatalities, said UN Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions, Michael Bloomberg, who was also at the summit in France.

The diseases “are responsible for more than 80 percent of all deaths globally, but the good news is, they are preventable”, said Mr. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg Philanthropies and the three-time former mayor of New York City.

Breathing more easily

Winner Fortaleza established its first legal framework for air quality surveillance in a bid to curb air pollution and help people breathe more easily.

The Brazilian city authorities in 2023 adopted a decree ensuring local monitoring of air pollutants and the installation of low-cost sensors for better data collection.

Greater Manchester meanwhile has continued its efforts to curb tobacco use, introducing its first smoke-free 6.5-acre park.  

The northern English city also launched a smoke-free toolkit for hospitals and is developing a broader toolkit to support organizations to create tobacco-free spaces.

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Tackling the world’s biggest killers

Participants in the healthy cities summit included representatives from Dhaka in Bangladesh, Helsinki in Finland, the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo, Lusaka in Zambia and Quito in Ecuador.

The participating urban centres are part of the Partnership for Healthy Cities, a global network of 74 cities launched in 2017 to prevent non-communicable diseases and injuries through policy and programmes.  

“These programmes are really making a difference,” said WHO’s Ms. Guerra. “And in the partnership, most of the cities are one million-plus people. In total, it covers more than 300 million people.”