2022 IANPHI Latin America Annual Meeting: Declaration of Cuernavaca on Health Equity
On October 5-7, 2022, members of the IANPHI Latin American Network gathered in Cuernavaca, Mexico for their annual meeting, hosted by the Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública de México.
The 2022 IANPHI Latin America Annual Meeting focused on the role of NPHIs in combating social inequalities and offered sessions on the global climate and environmental crisis, food insecurity and malnutrition, the COVID-19 pandemic response, and integrated disease surveillance and preparedness for health emergencies.
Participants included the directors of National Public Health Institutes (NPHIs) and their representatives from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, Peru, and Suriname. Representatives from partners organizations, including the South American Subregional Program (SAM) and the Central American Subregional Program (CAM) of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the Organization of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty (OTCA), the Andean Health Agency/Hipólito Unanue Agreement (ORAS/CONHU), and the Central American Integration System (SICA/COMISCA), also attended the event.
The meeting culminated with the adoption of the Cuernavaca Declaration, which calls on NPHIs to "further strengthen their strategic role in the generation of knowledge and evidence that facilitate decision-making and territorial intervention on social inequalities and corresponding health inequities."
The declaration also encourages the creation of observatories on health inequities as "a strategy that allows the development of powerful tools for the formulation of health policies and decision-making based on the evaluation of indicators of these inequities." It urges NPHIs to "strengthen their action in the fight against hunger and food and nutrition insecurity", to "mitigat(e) the effects of the environmental crisis", and "adopt the paradigm of integrated surveillance."