WHO chief Lee dies after blood clot surgery

Last Updated: 2006-05-22 9:28:22 -0400 (Reuters Health)

By Richard Waddington

GENEVA (Reuters) - World Health Organization chief Lee Jong-wook of South Korea, his country's top international official, died on Monday after surgery to remove a blood clot from the brain, the United Nations agency said.

Lee, 61, had been WHO director-general since 2003 and was spearheading the organization's fight against the global threat of bird flu.

"I am sorry to tell you that Dr. Lee Jong-wook, director-general of the WHO, died this morning," Spain's Health Minister Elena Salgado, who was chairing the session, told the opening meeting of the agency's annual assembly.

Her voice trembling, Salgado described Lee as an "exceptional person and an exceptional director-general."

"Under his leadership, the WHO has been strengthened and has been able to give an effective response to world (health) problems," she said before asking delegates from the 192 member states to observe two minutes' silence.

Work at the annual assembly, which runs until Saturday, was briefly suspended. Flags at the U.N. European headquarters, where the assembly was being held, flew at half mast.

Lee's deputy, Anders Nordstrom of Sweden, would take over as acting head of the Geneva-based organization until elections for a new chief could be convened, the WHO said.

Lee underwent an emergency operation on Saturday to remove a blood clot at the Cantonal Hospital of Geneva. He had been taken ill suddenly in the afternoon.

NO WARNING

The affable South Korean, who liked to pepper his press conferences with jokes, was a keen sportsman with no history of ill-health, officials said.

"There was no warning, no nothing. It was a complete shock," said Iain Simpson, a WHO spokesman.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, who traveled to six countries in southeast Asia with Lee last year, praised the director-general for offering the WHO "visionary leadership and a cooperative spirit."

Lee's WHO career began in 1983 as an adviser on leprosy to its West Pacific office. An expert on vaccination, he won recognition for his work in the fight against polio, helping lower the global rate of contraction to less than one in 10,000 of world population.

In 2000, Lee became director of STOP TB, a coalition of more than 250 global partners including WHO member states, donors, non-governmental organizations and private foundations.

He was elected to the top job in world health in January 2003 and took office in July as the WHO was beginning to win its battle against SARS -- severe acute respiratory syndrome -- the highly contagious respiratory disease that killed hundreds of people around the globe after spreading from China.

Within a year or so, the world was facing an even greater threat than SARS in the shape of bird flu, which experts fear could trigger a global pandemic in which millions may perish.

Bird flu is high on the agenda of the annual assembly, which will also debate whether or not to destroy the world's remaining stocks of smallpox as well as Taiwan's long-standing bid to win observership.

Lee is survived by his wife Reiko and a son.

(Additional reporting by Laura MacInnis)

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