🌍 World Health Day 2025 | “Healthy Beginnings, Hopeful Futures” — But for Who?
This year, the @who calls on governments to prioritise maternal and newborn health under the theme “Healthy beginnings, hopeful futures.” A vital cause — but we must also ask:
📉 Where is the urgency for men’s health?
📊 Between 2013 and 2021, women’s and maternal health research received $1.1 billion in government funding. Men’s health? Just $148.2 million — 7.5 times less, despite men suffering a greater burden of disease, experiencing higher rates of preventable death, and dying years earlier than women on average.
🧍‍♂️ There is no National Men’s Health Budget.
🧍‍♂️ No substantial investment in preventing paternal deaths.
🧍‍♂️ No long-term strategy to support men’s health and well-being.
In 2019–20, just 1.8% of Australia’s health budget was allocated to public health — including disease prevention and health promotion. We are underinvesting in the very things that keep people well, and we are completely overlooking half the population in the process.
On World Health Day, if we truly care about hopeful futures, we must include healthy beginnings for men and boys too — because men’s lives are not expendable.
