[Ip-health] Washington Post: Field of 11 Candidates Competes to Head WHO

[Thiru Balasubramaniam]

According to the official WHO site, Anders Nordstrom, the acting  Director-General is a national of
Sweden not Norway as mentioned in the article below.

Thiru

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<SNIP>

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. But handicapping the race is extremely difficult.

"It is such an opaque process. There is so much that is based on quiet
deals," said Nils Daulaire, a physician who heads the Global Health
Council, an advocacy organization based in Washington.


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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/04/AR2006110400792_pf.html

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*Field of 11 Candidates Competes to Head WHO*
Election of Director General Is Marked by Heated Rivalry Among Front-Runners

By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 5, 2006; A19

There is another election this week. The issues are not war, taxes,
morals or international credibility. They are microbes, diseases, data
and international credibility.

Eleven men and women are competing to become director general of the
World Health Organization, a 58-year-old branch of the United Nations
with headquarters in Geneva.

It is an office -- barely known outside public health circles -- whose
occupant can potentially affect the well-being of nearly every person on
Earth. For that reason, it is one of the few international elective
contests to which countries bring to bear a full range of hardball, but
soft-voice, diplomacy.

The current campaign features an intense rivalry between Japan and
China, an influential medical journal's support of Mexico's candidate,
and widespread rumors of electoral horse-trading.

The election will fill the vacancy created in May by the sudden death
from a brain hemorrhage 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. They will vote by secret ballot to whittle the field
to a single nominee by Wednesday and then present the name to
representatives of WHO's 193 member states on Thursday to be ratified or
rejected.

The organization, whose founding objective is "the attainment by all
peoples of the highest possible level of health," has a theoretically
infinite portfolio of tasks.

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.

WHO also periodically makes forays into operational roles.

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. But handicapping the race is extremely difficult.

"It is such an opaque process. There is so much that is based on quiet
deals," said Nils Daulaire, a physician who heads the Global Health
Council, an advocacy organization based in Washington.

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.

"We found an unacceptable paradox," he said in an interview earlier in
the fall. "Improved health is a key element to fight poverty, except
paradoxically, health care can be a source of impoverishment when a
society doesn't have fair financing."

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 is running on a "stand-pat" platform, committed to continuing Lee's
agenda, which included reduction in malaria and TB mortality and
broadening access to AIDS drugs, among other goals.

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.

Other candidates of note are Bernard Kouchner, co-founder of the
humanitarian organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without
Borders) and former health minister of France; Pascoal Mocumbi, who
served as health minister and, for nearly a decade, prime minister of
Mozambique; and Pekka Puska, who headed a landmark project that lowered
by up to 80 percent the astronomically high heart attack rate in eastern
Finland by promoting community-wide changes in diet, smoking, and
exercise. They are also physicians.

The United States has not declared whom it supports.

In the last election, the late voting was twice deadlocked between Peter
Piot, a Belgian who is the charismatic head of the United Nations AIDS
program, and Lee, who was a career WHO manager. It is widely believed
that the U.S. representative broke the tie by switching from Piot to Lee.

Many observers believe that among other things, the U.S. delegation
voiced its opposition to certain reproductive health policies WHO was
evaluating, including access to contraception and nonsurgical methods of
abortion.

"The visibility of that work seemed to be one [thing] that the U.S.
wanted reduced," said Derek Yach, a former WHO executive who now heads
the Rockefeller Foundation's global health program. Over the next few
years, it was, he said.