New health chief vows to tackle HIV
The new director general of the World Health Organisation took office today, with a pledge to focus on HIV/AIDS among other priorities.
Dr Lee Jong-wook, who was elected in May, replaces Gro Harlem-Brundtland after five years at the head of the organisation.
“Our work together in the coming years will be guided by three principles. We must do the right things. We must do them in the right places. And we must do them the right way,” Dr. Lee said in his inaugural address to the WHO staff.
That ties in with one of Dr. Lee’s main concerns: the need to achieve results at grass-roots level inside struggling countries, following his concern that “the proportion of resources devoted to WHO headquarters has crept steadily upwards”.
The core of the AIDS strategy will be the ‘Three by Five’ goal of providing three million people in developing countries with antiretroviral drugs by the end of 2005.
And along with the renewed emphasis on treatment, work on prevention, counselling and care will continue.
And Dr. Lee’s other key concern is working with individual countries to develop better training programmes and healthcare infrastructures to resolve the chronic shortage of medical and nursing staff.
Countries such as the UK could come in for criticism in this regard, as the health service has recruited thousands of nurses in recent years from poorer regions such as the Caribbean and the Philippines, while nurses from Africa often move from the private sector into the NHS, despite a ban on their recruitment.
