WHO needs to get cured, says expert

“WHO is very far, far from achieving its goals,” Sadik said, adding that even its current health strategy is “vague.”

The 32-member WHO executive board met in private session on Monday to approve a shortlist of five candidates for the post of director-general at WHO to succeed the outgoing head, Hiroshi Nakajima of Japan.

Besides Sadik, the Pakistani-born executive director of UNFPA, other candidates are Gro Harlem Brundtland, former prime minister of Norway, George Alleyne of Barbados, Ebrahim Malick Samba of Gambia and Uton Rafei of Indonesia. All five are medical physicians with strong credentials in public health.

Samba is who’s regional director for Africa, Alleyne is director of the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) in Washington and Rafei, head of the WHO’s regional office for Southeast Asia based in New Delhi. Two other names that featured in early speculation to lead WHO – Arif Batayneh, a former minister of health for Jordan – and Fernando Antezana of Brazil quit the race last year.

Asked how she would stack up against her competitors, Sadik said the absence of the Jordanian would be to her advantage because “we were both competing for the same votes.” “He comes from the same region as Pakistan,” she said.

“I believe I have a reasonable chance” of being chosen, Sadik said, but added she thought Brundtland “probably has the best chance.”“My experience with the UN system gives me an advantage. I know the system, and can go to who with all my knowledge running, so to speak,” she said.

The executive board will meet again in private session January 26 to interview each of the five candidates. Under new rules, candidates will make a presentation before the board and be subjected to questioning.

On January 27, the board will assemble again to vote on their choice. After the name of the successful candidate is announced, it will go before the World Health Assembly, the governing body of the WHO, for ratification in May.

An editorial last September in the Lancet, the influential British medical magazine, said that many people inside and outside who saw the impending change of leader as an opportunity to renew their commitment to “an organisation that has lost much respect and authority in recent years.”“With such diverse multilateral involvement, there has never been a more im portant moment for strong moral and technical leadership in world health,” the Lancet said. The British Medical Journal stated that changes in the world since who was founded nearly 50 years ago had put enormous pressure on who for greater change.

But the WHO failed to meet these challenges, primarily because of its “narrow, top down, service- oriented approach to health and its centralised, hierarchical bureaucracy,” the journal opined.