Ethiopia’s Tedros new WHO chief

GENEVA: Ethiopia’s Tedros Adhanom (pictured) was elected as the new head of the powerful World Health Organization on Tuesday, vowing to shake up an agency seen as needing major reform.

The former Ethiopian health minister beat out Britain’s David Nabarro and Sania Nishtar of Pakistan in the race to lead the UN’s public health body.

The result was confirmed in a statement by the WHO after three rounds of voting on Tuesday.

Tedros, a 52-year-old malaria specialist, 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.

In his final pitch to member-states before ballots were cast, Tedros vowed to staff the WHO with “a world-class workforce” while introducing strict accountability measures, which critics say have been sorely lacking at the Geneva-based agency.

He listed delivering universal healthcare, especially to the world’s most impoverished, priority.

Tedros said he refused “to accept that people should die because they are poor.” The WHO is perhaps the most influential United Nations agency, charged with emergency response and shaping baseline policies for treatment of major health challenges.

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 over 11,000 people. as his top