For the first time in its seventy-year history, the World Health Organization (WHO) will, effective July 1, be led by a nonphysician, an African, and a person from the global South: Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of Ethiopia
May 28th, 2017“……Tedros has a PhD in community health and has served as his nation’s minister of health and of foreign affairs, as well as a central committee member of the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front party.
Despite Ethiopia’s dismal human rights record, when campaigning for the position started in 2016, U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration backed Tedros, admiring his track record as minister of health. He is credited with leading a dramatic re-envisioning of health, in which forty thousand community health workers were trained to provide basic services at the village level and hundreds of clinics were built across the large, diverse nation. These steps resulted in sharp reductions in the rates of infectious diseases like malaria and HIV, and a decrease in the number of women dying during childbirth. The United States also appreciated Tedros’s transformative role as chair of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, bringing reform to an institution that had been fraught with fraud and “missing money.”….”
