The World Health Organization's (WHO) Roll Back Malaria partnership is responsible for formulating malaria policy and strategy, as well as supporting operations and capacity development and co-ordinating the WHO's global efforts against malaria. This includes providing guidelines, monitoring and evaluation for malaria prevention, treatment and control.

An independent global programme of scientific collaboration co-sponsored by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO). Its goal is to help coordinate, support and influence global efforts to combat a portfolio of major diseases of the poor and disadvantaged, including malaria.

It funds research teams in developing countries to improve on and develop approaches to disease prevention, diagnosis, treatment and control. It also supports capacity-building and implementation of new methods. These activities are focused in Africa, South-East Asia and South America. The website provides useful information in clear, accessible language on research activities, as well as background information on disease and transmission. It contains animated graphics of parasites' lifecycle, and a searchable archive of over 13,000 images related to tropical diseases freely available for non-commercial purposes. Download pdf 

The UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) focuses on nutrition in early childhood and in pregnant and lactating women but it also tackles nutrition in emergency situations and in HIV-infected people. Its website provides an overview of its activities including providing nutrition security in emergencies, monitoring infant growth rates, distributing micronutrients and child feeding and care.

News updates from UNICEF as well as tables of statistics relating to children and nutrition are freely available as well as links to UNICEF publications and external links.

This organisation, established by Kofi Annan in 2004, promotes action on water and sanitation issues and monitor progress towards the Millennium Development Goal to halve the number of people without safe access to drinking water and sanitation by 2015. It publishes information from its meetings as well as an overview of the organisation's Hashimoto Action Plan, which outlines a set of action points for achieving water and sanitation security.

The WHO Global InfoBase has, for the first time, assembled in one place, country-level risk factor data stratified by age and sex, with complete source and survey information. The current version of the InfoBase contains over 130,000 data points from more than 2,800 sources. Currently the InfoBase contains reports on 180 out of 192 WHO Member States. A unique feature is that each record can be linked back to all its survey information, including the primary source.

The database is updated daily and provides users with comparable country-level mortality, mean systolic blood pressure, mean body mass index, and overweight/obesity data. A search function allows users to customise their data search based on specific criteria, and shows data in text tables and graphs.

This part of the WHO's website focuses on the links between climate change and health. One factsheet looks specifically at climate change and infectious disease: it examines the historical evidence for links between climate and vector-borne disease, outlines different models to forecast climatic influences on infectious disease and offers examples of exactly how changes in climate can affect the spread of infectious disease. Another factsheet describes how to translate the science into useful policy decisions so will be particularly valuable for policymakers.

This website aggregates WHO publications on food safety and highlights relevant meetings and conferences. It includes links to the WHO initiative to estimate the global burden of foodborne diseases and links to the WHO's five keys to safer food that provides information and training material to improve food safety. Food safety, alongside nutrition and food security, is one of the WHO's strategic objectives for 2008–2013.

The WHO's site on influenza A(H1N1), or 'swine flu', provides daily updates and maps of the spread of the 2009 outbreak of swine flu and official WHO statements on the virus, as well as background documents and regional information.

It publishes guidance for different groups of people, including individuals, communities, national authorities and health professionals, and presents answers to frequently asked questions about the disease, vaccines, antiviral drugs, levels of pandemic alert and travel.

Readers can sign up to RSS and Twitter feeds to keep up-to-date with the latest developments.

This website gathers together the WHO's reports and other documents on malnutrition and health, and highlights relevant meetings and conferences. It hosts the WHO Nutrition Landscape Information System that provides downloadable data on nutrition and nutrition-related health and development data in the form of country profiles. The profiles focus on nutrition-related indicators such as vitamin and mineral deficiencies and food security.

This website provides the WHO's latest strategic approach to traditional medicine, as well as reports and other publications that map out global usage and existing regulations. The organisation is working to ensure a tight regulatory framework, and strongly advocates for regulatory reform.

The foundation's aim is to raise awareness of diabetes worldwide, with a special emphasis on developing countries. A key activity is funding projects (142 so far) that raise awareness, improve education and build capacity at local, regional and global levels. The website contains details of all ongoing projects, including details of the project budgets and individuals responsible for running them, the expected impacts and results so far. Importantly, the foundation prioritises monitoring and evaluation of its projects to learn key lessons for the future and minimise the risk of project failure.

As with any disease, and particularly those in developing countries, the health economics are important. The website has a useful tool for calculating the economic cost of diabetes in a particular country that allows the user to change variables such as population, prevalence and so on.

This section of the WHO's website includes factsheets on chronic diseases, details of the agency's relevant activities and programmes, and detailed technical information about action plan that the agency backs.

Also included are links to key reports on chronic diseases (detailed in the Reports section of Key Documents)