The Assembly will adopt WHO’s budget for the biennium 2002-2003 and decide whether it should be a zero real growth or zero-nominal growth budget.

In her address to the WHA, Director-General Dr Gro Harlem Brundtland will discuss the concrete steps needed to scale up efforts against diseases associated with poverty and the growing importance and scope of WHO’s work.

Featured speakers at the WHA will include Noerine Kaleeba, founder of the AIDS Support Organization (TASO Uganda) and programme development adviser for Africa to UNAIDS, and Diane Froggatt, Executive Director and Secretary of the World Fellowship for Schizophrenia and Allied Disorders.

Among the issues to be debated by the Assembly are:

• The global strategy for infant and young child feeding
• Strengthening health systems
• Strategies to combat HIV/AIDS, including access to essential drugs
• Health effects of depleted uranium.

The Assembly will include a series of roundtable discussions on mental health that will address such issues as stigma and human rights violations, and gender disparities.

Also scheduled are noon-time technical briefings on:

• Threats to global health security
• Tobacco product regulation
• Leprosy
• Violence and health
• Polio eradication
• Scaling Up the Efforts To Combat the Diseases Associated with Poverty.

A series of lunch-time press activities is also being arranged on subjects such as tuberculosis and polio. In addition to the awards given every year at the World Health Assembly, a special awards ceremony will honour the winners of the Global School Contest on Mental Health: seven year-old Dhruv Suri of New Delhi, India ; 14-year-old Tang Shu-wei from Guangdong Province, China; and 17-year-old Bibbie Kumangai of Palau.