Battles beyond the boardroom

THE untimely death of Dr. Lee Jong Wook, head of the World Health Organization (WHO), by no means deserves more than the usual obituary. Going by the record of this public health expert par excellence, his death is a loss not only to his family, colleagues and friends who knew him well: it is as much a loss to humanity, as it stands on the threshold of major battles against killer diseases, including the pandemics threatened by bird flu and HIV-AIDS.
       An Associated Press report credits him with being the man “who spearheaded the World Health Organization’s successive battles against SARS and bird flu.”
       Dr. Lee may not have been physically involved in the high-profile battle zones of African countries like Rwanda and Sudan, or in Afghanistan and Iraq—where a similar UN star, the Brazilian High Commissioner for Human Rights Sergio Vieria de Mello, was killed in a terrorist attack—but the battles he has fought for mankind, and those he had pledged to pursue in the final stage of his career, were no less bloody.
       He was virtually thrown into the hot seat when he assumed the WHO’s top post as SARS was doing its worst in 2004. In a few months, thanks to his steady leadership, unflappable disposition and his technical expertise combined with a keen appreciation for public health education and communication, mankind defeated SARs.
       Yet Dr. Lee was no stranger to crisis. Before that, Lee, a tuberculosis expert, was credited with running the WHO’s remarkable Stop TB program. “His leadership allowed us to put a tuberculosis program at WHO back on its feet,” said Dr. Mario Raviglione, who took over as head of the Stop TB program when Lee became WHO director-general in 2003, said the AP obit.
       “He had very clear ideas of what he wanted to do and was really committed to the problems of international health,” Raviglione said. “He was a rare individual. He didn’t talk much. When he spoke, he knew exactly why.”
       It turns out Lee, who had committed himself to the task of improving international monitoring to help tackle outbreaks of diseases like SARS, had wanted his mandate “defined by the fight against HIV/AIDS, particularly in the hardest-hit poor countries.”
       And yet, precisely because of his capable handling of the SARS crisis, he was pressed into action, away from HIV-AIDS, this time to the new potential pandemic: the feared death of millions of people should the avian flu jump to the deadly human-to-human transmission. Soon Lee’s time in office “came to be dominated by the high-profile spread of bird flu through Asia, Europe and Africa and its potential for causing a human influenza pandemic.”
       In an interview, one of the WHO’s pointmen in the impending big battle with bird flu had recently told a foreign correspondent that he was increasingly finding it hard to sleep, worrying about “when”—not “whether or not”—the human pandemic of bird flu would erupt.
       It is fair to presume that Dr. Lee, a man whose early exposure to hardship as a boy in Korea had always been passionate about his work, felt similarly as his subordinate about the challenge ahead. Whether this pressure contributed to his sudden death is unclear. What is certain, though, is that the man had devoted his career to the health and well-being of humanity, and his death is, as UN Secretary- General Kofi Annan puts it, “truly devastating.”
       As a person, he was described as low-key but efficient, and humorous (cracking jokes with reporters) despite the pressure of work. These are personal qualities that must have certainly accounted for his stunning success in not only defining the technical groundwork for battling infectious diseases around the world, but—by his ability to inspire—in marshalling resources from business and the private sector to support the mind-boggling challenge posed by these scourges.
       Time magazine named Lee one of the world’s 100 most influential people in 2004, the year he led the battle against SARS.
       Without one more capable warrior manning the ramparts against dreaded diseases, the world is certainly up against a bigger challenge to survive. One hopes that the void will somehow be filled—albeit not half as completely—by the recent initiatives taken by “conscienticized” business leaders and organizations, who are responding to the call of celebrity-development advocates like Bono, to share huge profits with the global campaign against HIV-AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.
       For in the final analysis, business probably realizes that profits mean nothing in a world where the “market” is overwhelmingly dominated by the hungry, the sick and the dispossessed. Indeed, the world cannot survive for much longer if it fails to bridge those great divides that mark out the enclaves of the filthy rich from the sea of slums where the majority try to survive.
       The epiphany of sorts we’ve seen in recent days obviously should have come sooner, but at least there is a response, and business is learning to go beyond tokenisms and the buzzwords of “corporate social responsibility” into the real battle for man’s survival. Without Dr. Lee, it’s just going to be harder, though.