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New UN health chief sets AIDS fight as priority
Geneva, July 21: The new head of the World Health Organization (WHO) promised to step up the fight against AIDS when he took office on today.
Geneva, July 21: The new head of the World Health Organization (WHO) promised to step up the fight against AIDS when he took office on today.
Little-known South Korean doctor Lee Jong-Wook, who has been with the United Nations agency for 20 years, also pledged the WHO would take a lead role in battling two other mass killers -- tuberculosis and malaria.
"We must scale up an integrated global HIV/AIDS strategy linking prevention, care and treatment, prioritizing poor and under-served areas," he said in his inaugural address.
"WHO...will be at the forefront of this effort."
Lee has already committed himself to helping raise the number of people in Third World countries receiving anti-AIDS drugs to three million by 2005, some 10 times the present number.
Lee, previously head of WHO's campaign against tuberculosis, replaces former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland at the helm of the $1.0 billion-a-year health body.
Brundtland pushed health issues ranging from AIDS to the growing threat from obesity higher up the international political agenda, and achieved success in her declared top priority with the conclusion of a global treaty on combating tobacco smoking.
She said she stood down because she felt that at 64 she was too old to serve another full five-year term.
The 58-year-old Lee, who brought in new names for the top jobs at the Geneva-based organization, said he would decentralize some WHO activities and boost technical help to poorer states among the agency's 192 members.
AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria will be grouped in a new division to help cooperation with the U.N.-backed Global Fund, which was launched last year as a key financing arm for the fight against the scourges which kill six million people a year, mainly in Africa.
The former deputy assistant secretary for health and science at the U.S. state department, Jack Chow, will head the division with Brazil's Paulo Teixeira, architect of the South American country's widely lauded anti-AIDS plan. Bureau Report
Little-known South Korean doctor Lee Jong-Wook, who has been with the United Nations agency for 20 years, also pledged the WHO would take a lead role in battling two other mass killers -- tuberculosis and malaria.
"We must scale up an integrated global HIV/AIDS strategy linking prevention, care and treatment, prioritizing poor and under-served areas," he said in his inaugural address.
"WHO...will be at the forefront of this effort."
Lee has already committed himself to helping raise the number of people in Third World countries receiving anti-AIDS drugs to three million by 2005, some 10 times the present number.
Lee, previously head of WHO's campaign against tuberculosis, replaces former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland at the helm of the $1.0 billion-a-year health body.
Brundtland pushed health issues ranging from AIDS to the growing threat from obesity higher up the international political agenda, and achieved success in her declared top priority with the conclusion of a global treaty on combating tobacco smoking.
She said she stood down because she felt that at 64 she was too old to serve another full five-year term.
The 58-year-old Lee, who brought in new names for the top jobs at the Geneva-based organization, said he would decentralize some WHO activities and boost technical help to poorer states among the agency's 192 members.
AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria will be grouped in a new division to help cooperation with the U.N.-backed Global Fund, which was launched last year as a key financing arm for the fight against the scourges which kill six million people a year, mainly in Africa.
The former deputy assistant secretary for health and science at the U.S. state department, Jack Chow, will head the division with Brazil's Paulo Teixeira, architect of the South American country's widely lauded anti-AIDS plan. Bureau Report