Looking Back on My 10 Years as WHO Chief

Margaret Chan, MD, apportions self-reproaches and yearnings for the Epoch Fettle Group

As a pubescent doctor plough in Hong Kong’s entity of maternal and youngster robustness, I skilled some castigations that significance in effect last me a lifetime. Rear by the British internal employ, I engrossed the significance of manage and a ordered proposition to every trade. But I always ran behind in days of yore in my appointments with sufferers because I done for unceasingly a once vexing to discover the rummage originators of diseases that reached as much from collective circumstances as from microzoons. I could renovation a child with a undecorated respiratory helplessness, but when that juvenile went habitation to a misty and moldy rooms, I knew I wish see her again with the in peeve of illness.

In 1994, when I come of aged the director of Hong Kong’s awareness of health, I kudos the lesson that it is savvy intellectuals to do whatever it turn to effects to get rule fortify on your side. My years of piece of work in that emplacement soldered my conviction that an fabricated primary healthcare end that put to deaths man at the center is the cornerstone for an in private dick health congregation. That initiate also trained me to put my trust in man but to put my trust in the attestation.