Dr Margaret Chan is the Director-General of WHO and was first appointed by the World Health Assembly on 9 November 2006.
Dr Margaret Chan, from the People’s Republic of China,
As of 2014, she is ranked as the 30th most powerful woman in the world according to Forbes.
Leader of the global health organization responsible for eradicating communicable diseases, including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and other vaccine-preventable diseases, Chan is widely viewed as having fallen flat in her efforts to combat Ebola. Last year the outbreak in West Africa took the lives more than 10,000 people, while an estimated 26,000 cases were reported around the globe. After issuing a mea culpa for inadequate action, WHO is preparing advanced contingency and intervention plans for possible future epidemics of this magnitude. A University of Western Ontario educated physician and Chinese native, Chan was first elected in 2006 and began a second five-year term in 2012.
On a global scale, the World Health Organization is Big Brother. Dr. Margaret Chan, the WHO’s director-general, is a confirmed skeptic. As she told China Daily last week– “I recommend that national governments ban, or at least regulate, them,” she said. (Elsewhere, Dr. Chan has opined that e-cigarettes should be regulated the same way cigarettes are regulated– even though they are not remotely equivalent in terms of harm.)
Chan officially became director general in early January 2007. In her first speech after taking the position, she outlined her specific goals of improving the health of people in Africa and of women around the world. “All regions, all countries, all people are equally important,” she stated, “but we must focus our attention on the people in greatest need.” In 2009, during an ongoing outbreak of swine flu that began in Mexico and subsequently spread to countries worldwide, Chan was confronted with the difficult task of assessing the potential global health impact of the disease. On June 11, 2009, following a series of meetings with an emergency committee from whom she sought scientific evidence on which to base her decision, Chan officially declared the swine flu outbreak a pandemic. It was the first pandemic to be declared since 1968.