Jong-Wook Lee Elected as WHO's New Boss

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Thursday, May 22, 2003

Jong-Wook Lee Elected as WHO's New Boss

Dr. Jong-Wook Lee of the Republic of Korea was elected as the new Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday at the ongoing 56th World Health Assembly.

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Dr. Jong-Wook Lee of the Republic of Korea was elected as the new Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) on Wednesday at the ongoing 56th World Health Assembly.

The new WHO chief will succeed Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway, and will start his five-year term on July 21, 2003.

Lee is the first person from the Republic of Korea elected to head a United Nations agency.

He announced that he would immediately expand and strengthen the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network to identify and respond to disease outbreaks around the world.

"SARS is the first new disease threat of the 21st century, but it will not be the last," he said in his acceptance speech to the assembly.

There was an urgent need for "stronger disease surveillance andresponse mechanisms at local, national, and global levels," said Lee, who recently traveled to China to see the problem posed by SARS and how it was being tackled.

Substantial funding has already been committed, he said, and 90percent of the resources would go to build a disease surveillance mechanism at national and regional levels.

Lee said that his priority tasks are to meet the health targetsof the Millennium Development Goals, to make use of resources to serve countries more effectively, to run WHO more efficiently, to ensure that WHO become more accountable, and to strengthen human resources both inside WHO and within its member states.

Lee has worked for WHO for 19 years on technical, managerial and policy positions. Born in 1945 in Seoul, he received a medical doctor's degree from Seoul National University and a master's degree in public health from the University of Hawaii.

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