As swine flu sweeps the planet, Margaret Chan, head of the World Health Organisation, tells how she is leading the battle against it – and the personal price she is paying.
Although she would no doubt point out that swine flu should properly be called H1N1, there is something pleasing in the fact that the first thing Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organisation, does when I enter her office is pick up a cut-out of a pig that has fallen on its face and carefully place it upright. A pink and gilt confection, it's left over from celebrating the Chinese year of the pig in 2007: it was so cute, she says, that she couldn't bear to throw it out.
A year earlier, Chan had been a surprise candidate in a surprise election (the previous incumbent died halfway through his term), but she won with a clear majority to become the first Chinese national to run a major UN agency. A rule change in 2005 (the WHO no longer has to beg states for information about threats to global health, but can just demand it) also makes her the most powerful public health official in history.
Tiny in her orange jacket and neat little orange-brown Miu Miu mules, she wears that authority not lightly, exactly, but naturally: in an organisation famed for its bureaucratic circumlocutions, she is refreshingly direct. It's a strength she's aware of – "I have a reputation for being a straight-talker, I will tell them the story like it is" – but that makes it no less striking, or true. (Also striking, for those who have witnessed it, is her penchant for bursting into song: she once punctured a tense moment at a summit about bird flu by singing a few lines of Getting To Know You, from The King and I.)
Months later, on 11 June 2009, she found herself the first WHO chief in 41 years to stand before the world and announce that a new virus had reached pandemic proportions. Right up until the last minute, scientists were calling her up and warning her to be careful about raising the threat alert so high — but the strict definition of "pandemic" is a new disease spreading uncontrollably through numerous countries, and on that count her decision has been completely borne out. On 11 June, swine flu had been registered in 74 countries; when we meet in Geneva four weeks later, it has just been confirmed in 140 countries.
0 Comments