W.H.O. Chief Dies After Surgery {NYT]
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN and JOHN O'NEIL
Dr. Lee Jong Wook, director general of the World Health Organization, died in Geneva this morning after undergoing emergency surgery for a blood clot in his brain on Saturday, the organization said in a statement.
He was 61 and had led the health organization since 2003.
His death was announced at the opening session of the annual meeting of the organization's 192 member countries in Geneva by Spain's minister of health, Elena Salgado, who was chairwoman of the session. Her voice trembling, Ms. Salgado praised Dr. Lee as "an exceptional person and an exceptional director-general," Reuters reported.
The organization announced that Dr. Anders Nordstrom, currently its assistant director general for general management, will serve as interim director-general.
Dr. Lee, 61, a South Korean, fell ill at a luncheon on Saturday in Geneva at the beginning of the weeklong meeting, called the World Health Assembly. He complained of a severe headache and later vomited, an official who was present said. Paramedics took him to the Cantonal Hospital in Geneva. Surgeons found that he had a blood clot on the brain known as a subdural hematoma and removed it.
Such clots often follow injuries to the head like those from a fall. But the W.H.O. said Dr. Lee had been in good health and was not known to have had any such injury. The clot also could have resulted from a bleeding artery in his brain.
Michael Leavitt, the secretary for Health and Human Services, who traveled with Dr. Lee in Asia last year, issued a statement today praising him for having offered "visionary leadership and a cooperative spirit."
A main issue for the World Health Assembly, which Dr. Lee had planned to address today, is to galvanize efforts to deal with an influenza pandemic and adopting a new set of regulations concerning international health.
Influenza experts say that a human pandemic of the disease will occur but that no one can predict when or where it will happen.
Of major concern is a threat posed by the A(H5N1) strain of the avian influenza virus. That strain has spread widely among birds from Asia to Europe and Africa since 1997, leading to the death or destruction of tens of millions of them.
While only a small number of people — 217 in 10 countries — have developed A(H5N1) avian influenza, the illness has been severe; 123 of the patients have died.
Experts are concerned that the avian strain could mutate or that human strains of influenza could combine with bird strains to create a new human virus that could cause a pandemic. So they are taking extra steps to investigate cases among people. For example, the W.H.O. is now assisting the Indonesian government in investigating five deaths from A(H5N1) avian influenza in one family. It is the largest such cluster of avian influenza deaths .
Dr. Lee, like many other public health leaders, repeatedly said that all heads of state should ensure that their countries develop a national pandemic preparation plan. In pursuing this goal, he met with many heads of state, including President Bush, President Jacques Chirac of France, and President Hu Jintao of China.
By most accounts Dr. Lee had a stormy course during his less than three years in office.
When he started the job, Dr. Lee pledged to help the world's poor. He championed an AIDS treatment program known as "3 by 5," which promised to make anti-retroviral therapy accessible to three million people by the end of 2005, most of them in poor countries. Although the effort fell far short of its goal, it helped change the way government leaders thought about making AIDS drugs available in poor countries. Dr. Lee urged governments and private organizations to make anti-H.I.V. drugs universally accessible by 2010.
Dr. Lee spent much of his career directing programs to eradicate polio and had hoped to achieve that goal while director general. But the goal remains elusive, largely because the disease spread from Nigeria to a number of other countries after officials in the northern province of Kano temporarily banned polio immunizations. Countries that had wiped out polio then had to conduct new large-scale immunization programs to stop spread of the virus.
Also, morale problems at W.H.O. headquarters led many staff members to participate in a one-day strike earlier this year, the first in the organization's 53-year history.
Dr. Lee's experience with the public-health ramifications of international events reached back to his early childhood. When he was 5 years old, during the Korean War, he, his mother and two brothers had to trek 250 miles through a bitterly cold winter to be reunited with his father.
"The first thing he did was take us to a bakery for cookies," Dr. Lee recalled during an interview at the time of his appointment to lead the W.H.O. "I cried."
His father and one brother went into politics, but Dr. Lee said that his mother pushed him toward medicine as a way to earn a steady living. After earning a medical degree from Seoul National University, he dropped out of a training program and enrolled at the University of Hawaii to study public health, out of a belief, he said, that he could do more good that way.
During that program, he traveled through Micronesia to treat leprosy patients and used the blood samples he collected to develop a faster leprosy test.
He earned a master's degree in public health, but never finished his preventive medicine residency, because in 1983 a medical officer who was moving to the W.H.O.'s headquarters convinced Dr. Lee to take the job he was leaving, which included working on leprosy in Fiji.
Dr. Lee said he considered it "just a job," but was hooked both by the fun of scuba diving there and the sense of accomplishment that came from working in the field. In 1986, he was promoted to work in the agency's regional office in Manila, and then in 1990 he moved to the Geneva headquarters.
When Dr. Lee was appointed director general, he became the first Korean to lead an international agency.
He is survived by his wife and one son, Tad, news services reported.
In the 2003 interview, Dr. Lee recounted Tad's reaction to the news of his promotion to director-general: "Dad, you may save the world, but I need a new car."
Dr. Lee, who was driving a Volvo with 180,000 miles on it, agreed.
When it came time for him to choose his official car as director-general, Dr. Lee requested a Toyota Prius, a gas-electric hybrid, to symbolize the need for environmental health and prevention.
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