The International Health Regulations (IHR) are an international instrument that is legally binding on all World Health Organization (WHO) Member States. The purpose and scope of the IHR is to prevent, protect against, control, and provide a public health response to, the international spread of disease in ways that are commensurate with and restricted to public health risks, and which avoid unnecessary interference with international traffic and trade.

On 23 May 2005, the 58th World Health Assembly adopted a revision of the previous version of the IHR formulated in 1969. The revised Regulations came into force on Friday 15 June 2007. Under the new IHR, Member States have much broader obligations to build national capacity for surveillance and response to Public Health Emergencies of International Concern (PHEIC) and share information about them, with a code of conduct for notification and response. The Regulations include a list of diseases whose occurrence must always be notified to WHO (smallpox, wild-type polio, new subtypes of human influenza and SARS), but also include an algorithm (PDF, 328 KB)

for countries to decide whether other incidents (which may be biological, radiological or chemical in nature) might constitute a PHEIC. The International Health Regulations (2005) are available to download from the WHO website.

National Focal Point Function

Under the International Health Regulations (2005), Member States are required to designate a National IHR Focal Point (NFP) to be accessible at all times for communications with the WHO IHR Contact Point. The UK government has designated the Health Protection Agency as the UK's NFP. For more information on how this works please see the NFP function page.

• National Focal Point function
  Added/updated: 15 September 2009