Relevance Of Behavioural And Cultural Insights In Times Of Pandemic

Author: Robb Butler
Affiliation: Executive Director of the Regional Director’s Offce of WHO

Abstract
In the last years, I have been working at the WHO ofce in Copenhagen which covers 53 countries across the European region. I'm a sociologist and not a health expert, neither I am an urban planner nor a designer. Indeed, I am not anybody truly working in your feld of expertise but, as a sociologist, I have a lot to say about the value of the social sciences and the humanities to the work that you all do and to your studies. I'm going to start by going back in time to look into the early 1800s, and precisely 1831, when cholera - the water-borne disease that is mostly spread by water - was a ripping through London.