Ethiopia’s Tedros elected new WHO chief
GENEVA: Ethiopia’s Tedros Adhanom was elected as the new head of the World Health Organisation ( WHO) on Tuesday, the first African at the helm of an agency widely seen as needing major reforms.
The former Ethiopian health minister, who has pledged to shake up the UN’s public health body, beat out Britain’s David Nabarro and Sania Nishtar of Pakistan after three rounds of voting.
Jubilant supporters, including one waving an Ethiopian flag, surrounded Tedros, a 52-yearold malaria specialist, after the final result was announced in the assembly hall at the UN’s Geneva headquarters.
In his first remarks as WHO’s director general- elect, Tedros vowed to “reclaim trust from member states and from every citizen in the world”.
He said delivering universal healthcare, especially to the world’s most impoverished, would be his top priority.
“Together, we will save and improve the lives of our most vulnerable brothers and sisters,” he said.
“All we do is for the people we serve.”
The WHO is perhaps the most influential United Nations agency, charged with emergency response and shaping baseline policies for treatment of major health challenges.
Tedros will take over on July 1, succeeding Margaret Chan, a Hong Kong native whose decade-long tenure was marred by the agency’s fiercely criticised response to the Ebola epidemic in west Africa.
The agency was broadly accused of failing the major test that followed the December 2013 Ebola outbreak, missing key warnings about the severity of an epidemic that ultimately killed more than 11,000 people.
Health officials, including from Washington, a key WHO donor, said the agency’s new leadership needed to get emergency response right.
“We know that the next health emergency is not a question of ‘if’ but ‘when’”, US health secretary Tom Price said in Geneva earlier Tuesday.
“When it happens the world will turn to the WHO for guidance and for leadership.
We need to be sure it is up to the task,” he told the Swiss Press Club.
Price congratulated Tedros in a statement following the vote.
Tedros becomes the first African to lead the WHO and had unanimous backing from the African Union, which claimed that the continent deserved a shot to lead the agency. — AFP