Health
World Tuberculosis Day
On the evening of 24 March 1882, a German country doctor turned bacteriologist named Robert Koch stood before the Berlin Physiological Society and …
Topic
Health
Awareness days devoted to health, medicine, wellbeing and the conditions that affect millions.
31 articles
Health
World Television Day
On 21 and 22 November 1996, the United Nations held its first World Television Forum, gathering broadcasters and media executives in New York to argue …
Health
World Sleep Day
On 14 March 2008, a network of sleep physicians and researchers held the first World Sleep Day under a plain-spoken slogan: “Sleep well, live …
Health
World Osteoporosis Day
On 20 October 1996, the United Kingdom’s National Osteoporosis Society launched the first World Osteoporosis Day, with backing from the European …
Health
World Kidney Day
The idea took shape in the spring of 2003, when the nephrologist Joel Kopple argued that chronic kidney disease was a growing global threat that sat …
Health
World Heart Day
The idea belonged to a Catalan cardiologist. Antoni Bayés de Luna, who served as president of the World Heart Federation between 1997 and 1999, …
Health
World Hearing Day
The date of World Hearing Day is a small visual pun that turns out to be deadly serious. The World Health Organization holds it every 3 March because …
Health
World Digestive Health Day
On 29 May 1958, on the closing day of the First World Congress of Gastroenterology in Washington, a gathering of physicians announced the founding of …
Health
World Diabetes Day
On the night of 31 October 1920, the London, Ontario surgeon Frederick Banting woke with an idea scrawled in his notebook about isolating the internal …
Health
World Day for Safety and Health at Work
On 28 April 1996, Canadian and American trade unionists laid wreaths for colleagues killed at work, choosing a date that already meant something to …
Health
World Cancer Day
On 4 February 2000, the President of France, Jacques Chirac, and the Director-General of UNESCO, Kōichirō Matsuura, sat in Paris and signed a …
Health
World Blood Donor Day
On 14 June 1868 a boy was born in Vienna who would, by 1901, work out why one person’s blood clumps and kills when mixed with another’s …
Health
World Autism Awareness Day
On 18 December 2007 the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 62/139, designating 2 April as World Autism Awareness Day from 2008 …
Health
World Alzheimer's Day
On 21 September 1994, at its annual conference in Edinburgh, Alzheimer’s Disease International launched World Alzheimer’s Day to mark the …
Health
World AIDS Day
In 1988, two information officers at the World Health Organization’s Global Programme on AIDS, James W. Bunn and Thomas Netter, were looking for …
Health
WHO World Mental Health Day
On 10 October 1992, the World Federation for Mental Health marked the first World Mental Health Day, an initiative driven by the organisation’s …
Health
WHO World Malaria Day
In May 2007, at the 60th session of the World Health Assembly in Geneva, delegates passed resolution WHA60.18 and, with it, turned a regional African …
Health
WHO World Hepatitis Day
In 1967, a geneticist named Baruch Blumberg, working at what is now the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, identified a protein in the blood of …
Health
WHO World Health Day
The World Health Organization’s constitution was signed by 61 states in New York on 22 July 1946, but it did not take legal effect until enough …
Health
US National Eating Healthy Day
For eight years running, between 2009 and 2016, the American Heart Association picked the first Wednesday of November and asked the country to think, …
Health
Sexual and Reproductive Health Awareness Day
In Canada, the second week of February has for years been set aside by the Public Health Agency of Canada as Sexual and Reproductive Health Awareness …
Health
Rare Disease Day
The first Rare Disease Day was held on 29 February 2008 — and the choice of the rarest date on the calendar, the leap day that comes only once every …
Health
Purple Day for Epilepsy
Roughly one in every hundred people will be living with epilepsy at any given time, which means that almost everyone knows someone affected, often …
Health
Pet Obesity Awareness Day
In 2007, an American veterinarian named Dr Ernie Ward founded the Association for Pet Obesity Prevention, having grown tired of telling the same …
Health
National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day
In 2006, the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Office on Women’s Health set aside 10 March to confront a fact that two decades …
Health
Menstrual Hygiene Day
In May 2013 a small Berlin-based charity ran a twenty-eight-day social media campaign with an unwieldy, faintly mischievous name: #MENSTRAVAGANZA. The …
Health
International Yoga Day
On 21 June 2015, on the wide ceremonial avenue then called Rajpath in New Delhi, just under thirty-six thousand people unrolled mats at dawn and moved …
Health
International Nurses Day
On the night of 12 May 1820, in the Italian city that gave her her name, Florence Nightingale was born into a wealthy English family who expected her …
Health
International Childhood Cancer Day
In 1994 a group of parents who had each watched a child face cancer did something quietly radical: they refused to grieve alone. They formed the …
Health
Canada Congenital Heart Defect Awareness Day
Roughly one Canadian baby in every hundred is born with a heart that did not form quite as the textbook says it should: a hole between chambers, a …
Health
Anosmia Awareness Day
Daniel Schein was in the fifth grade when he was told he could not smell, and like most who grow up with it he spent years assuming it was a minor …