• FluTrackers.com Inc. does not provide medical advice. Information on this web site is collected from various internet resources, and the FluTrackers board of directors makes no warranty to the safety, efficacy, correctness or completeness of the information posted on this site by any author or poster. The information collated here is for instructional and/or discussion purposes only and is NOT intended to diagnose or treat any disease, illness, or other medical condition. Every individual reader or poster should seek advice from their personal physician/healthcare practitioner before considering or using any interventions that are discussed on this website. By continuing to access this website you agree to consult your personal physican before using any interventions posted on this website, and you agree to hold harmless FluTrackers.com Inc., the board of directors, the members, and all authors and posters for any effects from use of any medication, supplement, vitamin or other substance, device, intervention, etc. mentioned in posts on this website, or other internet venues referenced in posts on this website.
  • We are not asking for any donations. Do not donate to any entity who says they are raising funds for us.

WHO to get new chief

Mingus

Well-known member
http://www.hc2d.co.uk/content.php?contentId=1030

<table style="width: 505px; height: 22px;" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><td class="sbd" width="100%"> Health News Article </td> <td class="sb" style="border-left: 3px solid rgb(255, 255, 255);"><input name="search" size="18" style="width: 132px;" type="text"></td> <td class="sb"><input src="http://www.hc2d.co.uk/images/buttons/search_button.gif" name="search_button" id="search_button" onmouseover="MM_swapImage(this.id,'','http://www.hc2d.co.uk/images/buttons/search_button_roll.gif',1)" onmouseout="MM_swapImgRestore()" type="image"></td> </tr> </tbody></table> <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="615"><tbody><tr> <td colspan="3" width="615"> WHO to get new chief
</td> </tr> <tr><td> </td></tr> <tr> <td width="403"> The Executive Board of the World Health Organisation (WHO) has announced a shortlist of five candidates for the post of Director-General.
The candidates, in alphabetical order, were named as: Kazem Behbehani; Margaret Chan; Julio Frenk; Shigeru Omi; and Elena Salgado M?ndez.

The election will fill the vacancy created in May by the sudden death from a brain haemorrhage of Lee Jong Wook, the South Korean physician who had headed WHO since July 2003. Anders Nordstrom, a Norwegian and longtime WHO executive, has been acting director general since then.

The voters are the 34 members of WHO's executive board, each from a different country.

WHO functions as the chief technical adviser to many developing countries on such issues as the use, safety, cost and effectiveness of drugs and chemicals. It provides information to governments on how to run vaccination programs and anti-smoking campaigns, and to practitioners on how to best prevent malaria and treat AIDS. It gathers disease and demographic data, the windows into global health needs -- and achievements.

It led an unsuccessful campaign to eradicate malaria in the 1960s and a successful one against smallpox in the 1970s, and it is overseeing the troubled assault against polio now. It has led global efforts that controlled Ebola, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and other diseases. The "3 by 5" initiative, which sought to help developing countries treat 3 million AIDS patients by 2005, missed its target by a wide margin but still transformed the world's expectations about care for that disease.

The candidates have run global campaigns underwritten by their governments. For example, Mexico's candidate, Julio Frenk, visited 26 of the 34 countries on the executive board. (He could not get into Iraq or Afghanistan, which are both represented on the board.) Two visited The Washington Post.

The leading candidates appear to be Frenk; Shigeru Omi of Japan, who is WHO's director for the Western Pacific, one of the organization's six regional offices that elect their own leaders; and Margaret Chan of China, who is on leave from her job as head of WHO's communicable diseases section and pandemic planning. All are physicians.

Frenk, who also holds a doctorate in sociology from the University of Michigan, in the late 1990s headed the WHO office in charge of marshaling health data to help governments make well-informed policies. In 2000, he left to become health minister in the administration of President Vicente Fox and oversaw creation of a universal health insurance program after data revealed that 4 million Mexican families were becoming impoverished each year by medical expenses.

The Lancet editorialized a month ago that Frenk "must surely be the objective front-runner" and put that assertion on the journal's cover.

Omi was openly critical of China during the SARS outbreak in 2003 and proposed an advisory that warned the public against travel to Hong Kong and Guangdong province, a key step establishing WHO's leadership in the response to the outbreak. That may be part of the reason China strenuously opposes him.

China's candidate, Chan, led Hong Kong's response to SARS and in 1997 to the first outbreak of H5N1 avian flu, roles for which she has been praised. Chan's and the city's commitment to transparency was believed to be one of the reasons the Chinese government blocked her appointment as an assistant director general of WHO at the start of Lee's term. She got a lower-level job.


</td></tr></tbody></table>
 
Back
Top