r.
Jong Wook Lee, a South Korean epidemiologist and expert on vaccines,
tuberculosis and diseases associated with poverty, was selected yesterday to
head the World Health Organization.Vaccination News Home Page subscribe Vaccination NewsLetter
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/29/health/29WHO.html?tntemail0
r.
Jong Wook Lee, a South Korean epidemiologist and expert on vaccines,
tuberculosis and diseases associated with poverty, was selected yesterday to
head the World Health Organization.
The American-trained Dr. Lee has worked for the United Nations agency, based in Geneva, for 19 years.
He was nominated as the new director general by a vote of the 32-member executive board. Final election, which is considered a formality, is expected in May when the entire membership meets.
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Dr. Lee edged out Dr. Peter Piot, a Belgian, who is director of the United Nations AIDS program, on the seventh ballot.
The other candidates were Dr. Julio Frenk of Mexico, Dr. Pascoal Manuel Mocumbi of Mozambique and Dr. Ismail Sallam of Egypt.
Dr. Lee said in a telephone interview after his selection that, when he was making career choices, he knew he would make more money as a private medical practitioner than in public health. He said he chose the latter because "in public health, if you do your job right, you can do good for tens of thousands of people."
He said, for example, that while he was working on a polio eradication program in the western Pacific area, he saw the number of new polio cases fall from 6,000 each year in 1990 to virtually none now.
"Of course, those who benefited won't know who I am and what I did, but when you look at the record it makes you feel very warm," Dr. Lee said. "More people should go into the field."
Dr. Nils Daulaire, the head of the Global Health Council in Washington, a not-for-profit organization, was an observer at the election. He said Dr. Lee "takes his work very seriously, knows his material, listens to his staff and guides people with coaxing, not pushing, to build a consensus, and has a quiet sense of humor."
Dr. Barry R. Bloom, the dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, praised Dr. Lee as "a master politician" who "is capable of sublimating his personal ambitions to let things get done."
Dr. Lee earned his medical degree from Seoul National University. He earned a master's degree in epidemiology and public health in 1981 from the University of Hawaii School of Public Health, where he focused on leprosy work.
After he joined the W.H.O. in 1983, Dr. Lee investigated leprosy in the South Pacific and worked in the agency's regional office in Manila before moving to Geneva in 1994 to direct its vaccines program, including the effort to eliminate polio, and its program to stop tuberculosis.
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