Dr Margaret Chan is the Director-General of WHO and was first appointed by the World Health Assembly on 9 November 2006. The Assembly appointed Dr Chan for a second five-year term at its sixty-fifth session in May 2012. Dr Chan's current term began on 1 July 2012 and will continue until 30 June 2017.
Before being elected Director-General, Dr Chan was WHO Assistant Director-General for Communicable Diseases as well as Representative of the Director-General for Pandemic Influenza.
Prior to joining WHO, she was Director of Health in Hong Kong. During her nine-year tenure as director, Dr Chan confronted the first human outbreak of H5N1 avian influenza in 1997. She successfully defeated the spate of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Hong Kong in 2003. She also launched new services to prevent disease and promote better health.
Election of Director-General - 2012
Member State-led consultation
Accountability Commission
Director-General's country visits
Election of Director-General - 2017
WHO year in review
What WHO does: bri •
Exclusive Interview with WHO's Dr. Margaret Chan
FrontLines: How does WHO work with USAID to deliver health services to developing countries?
Chan: WHO has long worked closely with USAID in a number of areas. Let me give just a few of many examples.
USAID has supported WHO in seeking practical solutions to the current severe shortage of health-care staff. This work, in turn, has improved coverage with antiretroviral therapy for HIV/AIDS in several African countries.
USAID has given WHO tremendous support in TB (tuberculosis) control, especially for laboratory work and including support for the introduction, together with field-level evaluations, of an impressive new diagnostic test that takes 100 minutes to produce results compared with the usual two-to-three months. This new tool promises to revolutionize TB care in resource-poor settings.
Equally important is USAID’s financial support for work in strengthening health systems in some of the world’s most needy, and most challenging countries, building on WHO’s on-going work in this area. Apart from rehabilitating hea
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Margaret Chan
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Leading the fight against infectious diseases
Margaret Chan is a Chinese doctor, born in 1947.
Chan studied medicine at the University of Western Ontario in Canada. In 1978 she joined the Department of Health of Hong Kong, where she started her career in the field of public health.
For nine years she was the Director of Health of Hong Kong. In the exercise of this office she launched new services to prevent the spread of disease and promote health. She promoted new initiatives to improve monitoring and response to infectious diseases, strengthen the training of public health professionals and improve local and international collaboration mechanisms. She effectively managed outbreaks of avian flu and severe acute respiratory syndrome.
In 2003 she joined the World Health Organization, being appointed in June 2005 Director of the Office of Infectious Diseases. Since 2006 she held the position of Director-General of WHO, the organization responsible for eradicating infectious diseases and diseases that can be prevented with va