What is the world coming to? That bastion of impenetrable bureaucracy, the World Health Organisation, has redesigned its web site, and, for the first time since the Pentagon got the idea of linking up its computers to help it win the third world war, it has become an accessible and useful Internet resource.

This is WHO's 50th year, and next Tuesday is World Health Day. So it comes as something of a surprise to find that information is available on both events, including a comprehensive pack of information on safe motherhood, this year's World Health Day theme. But the precedents are not encouraging.

WHO picks a new theme every year, and every year without fail it sinks without trace. In the UK there might, with luck, be a press release from the Department for International Development, which makes maternal health a priority in its Eliminating World Poverty white paper. But that's about your lot.

None of which is to belittle the importance of the issue.

Worldwide, 1,600 women die each day from complications of pregnancy, and most of the deaths are preventable; of all the health statistics WHO monitors, maternal mortality shows the widest inequalities between developed and developing world.

The problem is that WHO appears utterly indifferent to influencing opinion in the developed world, which it wants to put up the cash. Look at TB: WHO declared it a global emergency in 1993; yet only last month, experts in the field were accusing it of failing to raise the money to put its policies into action.

Former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, who takes over the director-generalship next year, should be sure when she moves from Oslo to Geneva to pack a large Viking axe. It may come in handy for getting rid of the dead wood.