A Fighter for Global Health: Who Will Be Next to Lead the WHO?

END OF TERM: Margaret Chan, director general of the WHO since 2007, will step down next year. Chan, here at a news conference in Seoul, South Korea, in 2015, is known for preferring consensus to confrontation. REUTERS/Kim Hong-Ji

The World Health Organization is preparing to select a new director general. It needs someone dynamic and politically astute to drive strategic reforms, say global health experts.

reuters.com - by Kate Kelland - September 23, 2016

. . . Chan’s low-key, consensual approach has held sway at the organisation for nearly a decade. . . .

. . . But as her second five-year spell at the top heads towards a close, numerous public health experts say consensus is no longer enough. In May, 10 influential global health specialists wrote to the British Medical Journal (BMJ), saying of the WHO: “Business as usual cannot continue; transformative leadership is called for.” The UN agency requires strategic reform, they said, and needs a bold new director general who can command the world stage. . . .

. . . When nominations closed this week, six candidates had been put forward to succeed Chan. They were Ethiopia's foreign minister Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus; Flavia Bustreo of Italy, an assistant director general at the WHO; Philippe Douste-Blazy, a French former minister of health; Sania Nishtar, a former minister of education and training in Pakistan; Miklos Szocska, a former health minister for Hungary; and David Nabarro, a British public health and nutrition expert with long experience of working at the WHO and the United Nations. He was appointed the U.N. secretary general's special envoy on Ebola in the midst of the Ebola crisis.

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