E-DRUG: Nomination Director General WHO (cont'd)

[Hilbrand Haak <haakh@compuserve.com>]

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Dear e-druggers,

I think the below New York Times article very well describes the new
Director General of WHO and the likely future direction of this
organization. I thought you would want to read.

Hilbrand Haak
E-drug moderator

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Next W.H.O. Chief Will Brave Politics in Name of Science

By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D.

For Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, the newly designated head of the World
Health Organization and former prime minister of Norway, the path from
medicine to international politics was natural. After all, she was born
into the Norwegian power elite, the daughter of a politically oriented
physician and long-time Cabinet minister. 

Yet her road in life is a striking departure from the conventional
track medical educators have long admonished doctors to take: "stick
to science and leave the politics to politicians." 

Dr. Brundtland said she rejected this dogma early, while still a student
at the University of Oslo and Harvard, and has been fighting ever
since "to have science taken seriously in politics." 

"Why should you leave politics, which is the most important thing
happening in a democratic society, to somebody who does not
understand science?" Dr.Brundtland, 58, said last week, shortly after
being nominated to head WHO. Members of the U.N. subagency are
expected to ratify her nomination at their annual meeting in May,
making her the first woman to head the Geneva-based organization. 

No field of medicine is closer to politics than public health. "You
cannot implement it without making it a political issue," Dr. Brundtland
said in a telephone interview from Davos, Switzerland, where she was
attending the World Economic Forum. 

Dr. Brundtland has condemned industrial countries for contaminating
the environment, opposed the pope over birth control, and championed
women's rights. She faces a daunting challenge in replacing Dr. Hiroshi
Nakajima, a Japanese physician, who will leave in July after a stormy
10-year tenure in which his critics charged that WHO had lost prestige
due to mismanagement, ineffectual leadership, and petty corruption. 

She said her first priority would be to improve the morale of WHO's
4,500 staff members by establishing clear priorities and allocating the
$1 billion annual budget accordingly. To that end, she envisions
strengthening ties to other U.N. agencies, the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund. 

One of Dr. Brundtland's basic beliefs is that health promotion is a key
to economic development. Improving health will generate vastly greater
profits to society than "playing the stock market or down-sizing the
microchip," she said. 

In three terms as Norwegian prime minister -- in 1981, from 1986 to
1989 and from 1990 to 1996 -- Dr. Brundtland increased the number of
women in the Cabinet and in other key government positions. Dr.
Brundtland said she intends to do the same at WHO, where about 30
percent of staff members are women, though the proportion among the
top echelon is much lower. 

Dr. Brundtland's goals reflect her upbringing in Oslo, where she
developed a strong ethos of social responsibility and a belief that
public service was a good thing, even for a doctor. Dr. Brundtland's
father, Gudmund Harlem, was a pioneer in rehabilitation medicine in
Norway and served as Norway's minister of social affairs from 1955 to
1961 and as minister of defense from 1961 to 1966. 

Dr. Brundtland said she chose the specialty of preventive medicine in
the belief that prevention was better than cure and as a way of
following her father's idealism. 

Dr. Brundtland has lived in the United States twice. The first time was
in 1949 as a fifth grader in a Brooklyn school when her father learned
the then-new specialty of rehabilitation medicine under Dr. Howard
Rusk at New York University. She returned to the United States in
1964. While her husband, a political scientist, studied with Henry
Kissinger at Harvard, she used a grant to earn a degree from the
Harvard School of Public Health, studying American efforts to combat
pollution and other environmental problems. 

But she said one of the most important lessons she learned was
overcoming her shyness. Dr. Brundtland said she had been "a listener
and careful about stating my views" until teachers challenged her to
express her views on health issues. 

When Dr. Brundtland returned to Norway, she worked in maternal and
child health for the national government and the Oslo Board of Health.
In 1974, Prime Minister Trygve Bratteli, a friend of her father,
summoned Dr. Brundtland to his office to ask her to join the Cabinet.
The appointment was less of a surprise than the position -- as
environment minister, not health minister. 

Within two months, she said, she had learned that she "could do much
more in politics than medicine to change society in the way that you
think is right." Her tenure coincided with a growing interest in the
environment, and Dr. Brundtland established a popular program that
created nature reserves. In 1977, she was elected to Norway's
parliament as a member of the Labor Party. She said she "came to
enjoy taking the floor." In 1981, at age 41, Dr. Brundtland became
prime minister, the youngest woman to head a western European
country. But eight months later, she and her party lost power in
elections. 

Dr. Brundtland was a formidable politician who showed an occasional
flare of humor. When the opposition Conservatives pointed out that her
husband, Arne Olav Brundtland, had once been a member of their
party, they came up with a campaign slogan: "Do as Gro did. Choose a
Conservative." But Dr. Brundtland quickly responded: "Do as Arne Olav
did, choose Gro." She won the election. 

As chairwoman of the World Commission on Environment and
Development from 1984 to 1987, she promoted the concept of
"development that meets the needs of the present without compromising
the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." 

In 1992, Mrs. Brundtland quit as Labor Party leader a month after her
24-year-old son committed suicide. Four years later she resigned as
prime minister. Does experience as prime minister qualify someone to
lead the World Health Organization? "The Norwegian national budget is
70 times the WHO budget," Dr. Brundtland said, adding that in 10
years as prime minister, she learned how to manage resources and set
political priorities. Also, Dr. Brundtland said, she can exercise her
political skills "in being an advocate for health, making it a major
concern for leaders and raising health closer to the top of the political
agenda." 

It is well known that poverty leads to ill health, but newer research
"is making it increasingly clear that ill health leads to poverty in
individuals, populations and nations," Dr. Brundtland said. She pointed
out that a lack of vitamin A can cause permanent brain damage in a
child, but can be prevented at a cost of pennies. "There is a great
need to spread this knowledge and to have it acknowledged by prime
ministers, finance ministers and those who make government decisions
around the world," Dr. Brundtland said. 

How would Dr. Brundtland judge her term at the World Health
Organization when it ends in five years? It will have been a success,
she said, if public policy has become more scientifically based and if
government leaders have moved health to the top of their agendas, in
the realization that investments in health are not only humanitarian,
but also aid productivity and economic development. But that hinges
partly on whether doctors adopt a new attitude toward participating in
politics. 

Tuesday, February 3, 1998
Copyright 1998 The New York Times
  
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