TB medic wins global health post
New director-general elected for
World Health Organisation.
30 January 2003
DECLAN BUTLER
This article is from the news section of the journal
Nature.
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| Jong Wook Lee's Stop TB
programme was widely commended. |
| © WHO |
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Jong Wook Lee, a South Korean physician, is set to succeed
Gro Harlem Brundtland as director-general of the World Health
Organization (WHO).
Lee, who has worked for the agency for 19 years, emerged
victorious after a secret ballot by the agency's 32-member
executive board on 28 January. It was a close finish with Peter
Piot, a former AIDS researcher who now heads the Joint UN
Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). Both men were neck-and-neck
after the second round of voting, with Lee clinching the win in
a tiebreaker vote. Pascoal Mocumbi, Mozambique's prime minister,
who had been tipped as a favourite for the post
1was eliminated in the first round.
Lee has served as head of the WHO's vaccine and immunization
programme, and since 2000 has fronted the agency's Stop TB
programme. This widely commended initiative involves a
consortium of 250 partners including WHO member states, donors,
industry and non-governmental organizations.
In his election manifesto, Lee said that targeted investment
in particular diseases was not sufficient to make a dent in the
global health burden. He promised to press for "substantial
investments in health services".
Lee also said that he would continue Brundtland's efforts to
restructure the WHO, which at the time she took over was widely
criticized for being an ineffective, excessively politicized
bureaucracy.
Brundtland succeeded in putting the WHO and global health
issues such as malaria and TB on the international agenda. But
she was less successful in her reforms to streamline the agency,
and many staff complain of an aloof management culture.
Lee has pledged to boost the low morale among WHO staff, and
launch employment programmes to attract the best recruits. He
also plans to decentralize the management of WHO programmes to
relevant regions, for example by shifting the leprosy programme
to India, and traditional medicine to its western Pacific
regional office.
The nomination must now be approved by the WHO's 192 member
states at the 56th World Health Assembly in Geneva in May, with
the new director-general beginning his five-year term on 21
July.
Declan Butler is the European Correspondent of the journal
Nature |
