This article was produced in partnership with the United Nations to launch the biggest-ever global conversation on the role of cooperation in building the future we want. Share your voice by taking the 1-minute UN75 survey.
Healthcare is a fundamental right. That idea may be at the crux of American politics right now, but it's not an American concern—it's a human one. The United Nation's third sustainability development goal honors that universality by transcending what divides us — borders, socio-economics, religion, and language — to further ensure basic healthcare for all people around the globe, narrowing their focus to four crucial categories: maternal health, infectious diseases, reproductive health, and non-communicable diseases.
Of course, what constitutes "basic" healthcare is always evolving. In the 18th century, an experimental smallpox vaccine was administered to Catherine the Great but the World Health Assembly didn't expand that privilege to all populations until 1958. The vaccine evolved from a rare privilege to a fundamental one. Today, smallpox is eradicated.
To honor the UN's commitment to bringing basic healthcare to people around the globe, check out some of the spectacular achievements humanity has made over the years:
1818: British obstetrician James Blundell performed the first successful human blood transfusion — transferring blood between a patient who had hemorrhaged during childbirth. Blood transfusions now save countless lives.
1867: Joseph Lister publishes his "Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery." Believing cleanliness during surgery was imperative not only to the medical procedure's success, but also to the patient's subsequent recovery. He implored his colleagues antiseptic surgical methods such as the use of carbolic acid to clean wounds and instruments. Sure enough, his methods quickly became common practice, with one particular hospital noting a staggering decrease in death rates from infectious disease from 60% to 4%.
1879: Pasteur discovered the first vaccine with a disease called chicken cholera.
1928: Alexander Fleming discovers Penicillin, later dubbed "the wonder drug." In the pre-antibiotic era of the early 1900s, people had no medicines against these common germs and as a result, human suffering — especially in regards to children and the elderly — was enormous.
1954: More than 1.3 million U.S. children participated in a trial of Salk's inactivated polio vaccine.
1980: Global eradication of smallpox declared. Because of widespread vaccination, polio was eliminated from the Western Hemisphere. The World Health Organization achieved this goal with the last endemic case of smallpox reported in Somalia in 1977.
1995: A combination drug treatment known as the "AIDS cocktail" is introduced. This type of therapy was originally known as highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). In Africa, where the HIV/AIDS crisis hits hardest today, doctors are slowly making progress, and in some cases real gains, which is the case with the use of antiretroviral drugs to block mother-to-infant HIV transmission.
2018: A single dose cure for malaria is approved. In a study of the treatment—called tafenoquine—60 percent saw no relapse six months after taking the drug. Tafenoquine has been submitted for approval to the Australian regulatory authority and is slated to be submitted for approval in malaria-endemic countries. Experts hope this new treatment will accelerate the path to elimination of this mosquito-borne disease.
As part of celebrating its 75th anniversary, the UN calls for accelerating sustainable solutions to all the world's biggest challenges including ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being at all ages. You can help by getting involved in various good health campaigns or joining the global conversation about the role of international cooperation in building the future by taking the 1-minute UN75 survey.
Robin Williams performs for military men and women as part of a United Service Organization (USO) show on board Camp Phoenix in December 2007
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Pictured: A healthy practice?
Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.