The new director general of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Jong Wook Lee of South Korea, took office on Monday, vowing to provide three-million HIV/Aids patients in poor countries with key anti-retroviral drugs within two years.
Lee said in an inaugural speech here that he wanted to strengthen the United Nation’s health agency’s role in its fight against the HIV/Aids pandemic, with the ”Three by Five” programme guiding most of its work, the WHO said in a statement.
The 58-year-old also aimed to tackle the shortage of health care staff worldwide, and shift more resources away from WHO headquarters to areas where people lack basic health care.
”The shortage of skilled health personnel slows progress towards health goals such as ‘Three by Five’ and the millennium target on maternal mortality. Our cooperation with countries on this issue must intensify,” he said.
”Our work together in the coming years will be guided by three principles,” he told staff.
”We must do the right things. We must do them in the right places. And we must do them the right way,” Lee added.
He also marked his takeover from outgoing WHO chief Gro-Harlem Brundtland with sweeping changes at the top of the health agency, notably sidelining David Heymann, the head of WHO’s communicable diseases section who led succesful international efforts to contain the Sars virus earlier this year.
Heymann was replaced by Anarfi Asamoa-Baah, a WHO official from Ghana, while Jack Chow of the United States was named assistant director general for HIV/Aids, tuberculosis and malaria.
A French official, Catherine Le Gales-Camus took over as assistant director general for non-communicable diseases, replacing Derek Yach of South Africa.
Yach had spearheaded efforts to conclude an international treaty aimed at fighting smoking and controlling tobacco marketing and sales.
The Framework Convention on Tobacco Change was adopted by the WHO in May after four years of negotiations and a tussle with the tobacco industry.
Most of the WHO’s top posts were changed.
Lee takes over the UN health agency at a time when the global body is squaring up to new viruses, such as the deadly Sars epidemic that killed more than 800 people and infected more than 8 000 in some 30 countries.
On his election by the WHO’s 192 member states in May, Lee had vowed to strengthen the global outbreak alert and response network to identify and respond to outbreaks of disease.
”Sars is the first new disease threat of the 21st century, but it will not be the last,” he warned.
Spanning 20 years, Lee’s career at the WHO has seen him in numerous technical, managerial and policy posts. After his medical doctor’s degree, the new WHO head began his career in Samoa at a tropical medical centre and in 1983 joined the WHO as a leprosy consultant in Fiji. He went on to become team leader for leprosy control in the South Pacific.
He focused on running polio eradication initiatives in the Western Pacific until 1994, when he took over as director of the WHO’s global programme for vaccines and immunisation. In December 2000, he also became director of the Stop TB (tuberculosis) campaign at the WHO and contributed to setting up a world system for providing anti-TB drugs. – Sapa-AFP