Geneva: WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was reappointed for a second five-year term on Tuesday by member countries without any opposition. Tedros is the first African to head the World Health Organization, that too a second time.
“This is overwhelming” said Tedros, fighting back tears. He described himself as ‘a child of war’ after signing the contract for his extension.
But while Covid and other pandemic threats continue to feature prominently in his speeches, Tedros has been increasingly focused on the heavy toll war and conflict like the ones raging in Ukraine are taking on global health.
“More even than pandemics, war shakes and shatters the foundations on which previously stable societies stood,” the 57-year-old former Ethiopian minister of health and foreign affairs said on the first day of WHO’s main annual assembly Sunday.
“And it leaves psychological scars that can take years or decades to heal,” he said, stressing that he had experienced this firsthand.
With the Covid-19 pandemic still raging and demands for dramatic reforms of the entire global health system to help avert similar threats going forward, there will be no shortage of challenges in his second term. New health menaces already loom, including hepatitis of mysterious origin that has made children in many countries ill, and swelling numbers of monkeypox cases far from Central and West Africa where the disease is normally concentrated.
