WHO
revere | May 20, 2007Indonesia's Health Minister, Siti Fadilah Supari, has joined WHO's Executive Board.
The Detikcom news website reports Siti Fadilah Supari has been elected unanimously during the 60th World Health Assembly meeting in Geneva,
The health minister says the nomination represents world recognition and appreciation of Indonesia's active role in coping with global health problems. (Radio Australia)
Sort of like George Bush giving the Medal of Freedom to the architects of the Iraq War, I guess.
I had a hard time deciding what tag to put on this, although "Humor? (sarcasm)" seemed the most appropriate…
revere | May 18, 2007WHO's Director General is talking tough, but is she talking tough to the right people? We don't know, but we can keep our eye open for results:
Addressing concerns raised by developing countries such as Indonesia, Chan said she was committed to finding ways of distributing potentially life-saving vaccines in the event of a human influenza pandemic.
"WHO recognises the concern of many developing countries and I am fully behind you. That's why we are taking a series of actions to make sure that developing countries have equitable access to affordable pandemic vaccines," she said.
Chan also…
revere | May 15, 2007Indonesia has just registered its 76th death and 95th case of bird flu, making it the country with more of each than any other nation. Not that you would know it by looking at the current WHO count of confirmed cases. That's because Indonesia hasn't sent WHO any viral isolates for confirmation since January. We've covered this too often to repeat the details (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here for some background), but the issue is now front and center in this week's World Health Assembly, the official governing body of WHO convened in Geneva:
The issue of sharing…
revere | May 9, 2007An article by Norwegian researchers in the UK medical journal, The Lancet, takes WHO to task for making issuing guidelines without adequate reference to existing evidence.
The study was conducted by Dr. Andrew Oxman and Dr. Atle Fretheim, of the Norwegian Knowledge Centre for Health Services, and Dr. John Lavis at McMaster University in Hamilton. They interviewed senior WHO officials and analyzed various guidelines to determine how they were produced. What they found was a distinctly non-transparent process.
"It's difficult to judge how much confidence you can have in WHO guidelines if you're…
revere | April 30, 2007"China" was one of the founding members of the United Nations. Whatever you mean by "China," anyway. When the UN was formed in 1945 there was only one China. After the Revolution of 1949 the losing side retreated to Taiwan and claimed the title of Republic of China. The US and its allies stupidly continued to recognize them as "China" to keep another communist country from the Security Council, but by 1971 the absurdity of denying mot Chinese a seat in the UN was patently obvious and the People's Republic of China took the place of the ROC. At the time I was strongly in favor of this and I…
revere | April 17, 2007Some of the most boring sounding parts of epidemiology are also the most important. Take the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), now in its tenth revision (ICD-10). This is a standard way to code disease diagnoses that has its origins as far back as the 1850s. It was taken over as an official function of the World Health Organization (WHO) on its founding in 1948. By then it was already in its sixth revision. Versions of ICD9 and ICD10 are used for epidemiology, national health planning and health care management, where your insurance reimbursements are governed by ICD codes. It's…
revere | March 3, 2007When Indonesia withdrew from the longstanding system whereby countries shared influenza virus with WHO there was widespread consternation in the public health community. The sharing system has been used for many years to determine the candidate strains for the following year's vaccine. The regular seasonal flu vaccine has three components corresponding to the prediction of which of the influenza A H1N1, H3N2 and influenza B strains will be circulating during the next flu season. Usually the guess is correct, although sometimes it misses. In any event, global surveillance of circulating virus…
revere | January 23, 2007Dr. Margaret Chan has been on the job at WHO for about a month. So far so good. Two weeks ago she named Dr. Anarfi Asamoa-Baah as WHO's Deputy-Director General. I don't know him, myself, but those who do (and whose judgment I trust) have nothing but the highest praise for him, describing him as "brilliant." This is generally thought of as a wise and effective move. One appointment doesn't make a successful tenure, but I'd rather be giving provisional approval than complaining about something.
Dr. Chan's statements on bird flu, while not startling, are at least accurate. Monday she addressed…
revere | January 20, 2007Reading the comments here can be both exhilarating and dismaying. The peevishness I see about WHO falls into the dismaying category. People who follow bird flu have a tendency to get crotchety with WHO over some of its more flagrant gaffes and obvious attempts at spinning, although which way the spin goes isn't always clear. But WHO does a lot with a little, a budget less than that of some major American hospitals. We've been (we think appropriately) critical of WHO here, but it is an agency that also has done, and continues to do, a powerful amount of good in this world. The recent…
revere | November 10, 2006In an example of the adage, "Be careful what you wish for," China's choice for WHO Director General, Dr. Margaret Chan, is already finding her reputation will be held hostage to the behavior of China itself, not an enviable position.
The new chief of the World Health Organisation, Margaret Chan of China, pledged to put her nationality aside and to use her leverage on Beijing to combat major threats such as bird flu.
"Now I'm elected as the WHO's Director General I no longer carry my nationality on my sleeve. I leave it behind," she told reporters after her nomination was endorsed by more than…
revere | November 8, 2006The WHO Executive Board has selected Margaret Chan as the next Director General of the agency (via AP). Her name will go to the agency's governing body, the World Health Assembly, for approval tomorrow. Chan was strongly championed by China.
As we have made clear here, we didn't think Chan was the optimal choice at this point in WHO's history. We hope we were wrong and will look on with anxious interest to see how independent and visionary she will be in advancing WHO's mission.
We wish Dr. Chan -- and the rest -- of us, good luck.
revere | November 7, 2006The Lancet is my favorite medical journal. Maybe it's because I've had the privilege of publishing there on occasion, but mainly because they have consistently taken a public health perspective despite the fact they are a medical journal. Often that perspective has been controversial and just as often courageous. Like another of my favorite journals, Nature, The Lancet is published in the UK, which might explain its interest in global issues, compared to US medical publications like The New England Journal of Medicine or The Journal of the American Medical Association.
In any event, The…
revere | November 4, 2006The US midterm election will be held on November 7 and American politicians are busy doing what they do best: pointing fingers at each other and avoiding the issues. They are not the only ones campaigning for office next, week. The two days after the US elections the World Health Organization executive committee will also elect a new Director General. The choice may or may not turn out to be of equal importance to the US election. It will depend on who is elected.
Why might it matter? WHO is reaching a critical point in its history. Founded in 1948 in the wake of the Second World War, WHO was…
revere | November 3, 2006It is tiresome to report the same story over and over again (for a few previous posts see here, here, here, here and here), but sometimes necessary. It has been widely reported -- again -- that the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture is withholding isolates of H5N1 it promised to provide. Indeed, WHO's Beijing office reports it has received no isolates since 2004.
The issue came to the scientific world's attention again last week when a team of Hong Kong and American researchers reported a new sublineage of H5N1 has become dominant in southern China and southeast asia in the last year, the first…
revere | October 29, 2006The US midterm elections have a nasty side, but so does another, less visible election, that for Director General of the World Health Organization. Thirteen candidates are vying for the position left vacant by the untimely death of Lee Jong-Wook in May. And the politicking is said to be fierce.
One visible evidence is a new campaign against the Mexican candidate, Julio Frenk. Frenk is a well-regarded public health advocate for the poor who has been endorsed by the editor of The Lancet, the noted British medical journal (other posts on the election here and here). At issue is the role Frenk…
revere | October 8, 2006The Lancet, one of the world's leading medical journals, is taking sides in the battle for new Director General of the World Health Organization:
Mexico Health Minister Julio Frenk should be favored among 13 candidates to head the World Health Organization because of his technical and administrative skills, said Richard Horton, editor of the medical journal Lancet.
Frenk, 52, is the only contender for the agency's top job with a "high level" of experience in global health, policy- making and health-system management in a low- to middle-income country, Horton said. France's nominee, Bernard…
revere | September 21, 2006Nature is one of the premier scientific journals in the world. But they are also getting out in front on some important issues in their news and Editorials. They are fast becoming THE premier scientific journal in the world. Its chief rival, Science hasn't changed with the times. Nature has embraced the new medium of the internet in very innovative ways and continues to experiment with it. Nature is adapting successfully. Its rivals are being left in the dust.
Nature is published in the UK. So it is strange that they, rather than the US-based Science, has weighed in on the disarray at CDC,…
revere | September 20, 2006Nick Zamiska had an interesting piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal about the difficulty WHO is having encouraging a sense of urgency about a possible pandemic of avian influenza and the many other programs and problems with which they are daily engaged in a (literally) life and death struggle in many places in the world most of us have never heard of. The problem is made more difficult because of the roulette-wheel like nature of an emerging pandemic. We don't know when or if our number will come up or how much we should invest in the event it does. So far it hasn't happened, which is a…
revere | September 13, 2006Two members of the UN Security Council, China and France, broke with tradition last week and nominated candidates for the position of WHO Director General. In the past Security Council members have not had citizens in that post. China's candidate is Dr. Margaret Chan. She has a controversial history as health director in Hong Kong during the SARS and 1997 H5N1 outbreaks. Whether she is fairly or unfairly blamed is a matter of debate, but Karl Greenfeld's book on SARS, The China Syndrome, does not indict her particularly, although it has harsh words for the Chinese leadership. Our concern…
revere | September 7, 2006As promised, we have the full slate (13) of those running for Director General of the World Health Organization:
Dr. Kazem Behbehani (Kuwait); Dr. Margaret Chan (China); Dr. Julio Frenk (Mexico); David Gunnarsson (Iceland); Dr. Nay Htun (Myanmar); Dr. Karam Karam (Syria); Dr. Bernard Kouchner (France); Dr. Pascoal Manuel Mocumbi (Mozambique); Dr. Shigeru Omi (Japan); Dr. Alfredo Palacio (Ecuador); Pekka Puska (proposed by Finland); Elena Salgado (Spain) and Dr. Tomris Turmen (Turkey). (Canadian Press)
The CP story (no byline but likely Helen Branswell) also tells us the Executive Board (see…