Biography of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
Real Name | Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus |
Famous as | Director general of the World Health Organization |
Personal Life | |
Eye color | Brown |
Hair color | Grey |
Birthplace | Asmara, Eritrea |
Nationality | Ethiopian |
School | London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine |
Family | Father- Adhanom Gebreyesus Mother- Melashu Weldegabir |
Zodiac | Cancer |
Girls, Affairs and more |
Tedros Adhanom, in full Name is Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, (born March 3, 1965, Asmara, Ethiopia [now in Eritrea]), Ethiopian biologist and public health official who was the first African to serve as director general (2017– ) of the World Health Organization (WHO). During his tenure with WHO, he worked to accelerate progress against diseases that affected millions of people each year, including HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. He was known in particular for his responses to the 2018–20 Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and to the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic, in which he led efforts to establish transparency and international cooperation to control the spread of disease. The way in which Tedros worked with governments to secure transparency on disease was at times controversial; he was criticized in particular for overlooking affronts to human rights, including censorship and repression, in his efforts to coax cooperation from authoritarian governments.
He is the first WHO Director-General to have been elected from multiple candidates by the World Health Assembly, and is the first person from the WHO African Region to serve as WHO’s chief technical and administrative officer.
Immediately after taking office on 1 July 2017 Dr Tedros outlined five key priorities for the Organization: universal health coverage; health emergencies; women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health; health impacts of climate and environmental change; and a transformed WHO.
Prior to his election as WHO Director-General, Dr Tedros served as Ethiopia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2012–2016. In this role he led efforts to negotiate the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, in which 193 countries committed to the financing necessary to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.
Dr Tedros served as Ethiopia’s Minister of Health from 2005–2012, where he led a comprehensive reform of the country’s health system. All roads lead to universal health coverage for Dr Tedros, and he has demonstrated what it takes to expand access to health care with limited resources.
Tedros was conceived in Asmara, which around then was in Ethiopia—yet is currently the capital of Eritrea to Adhanom Gebreyesus and Melashu Weldegabir. The family began from the Enderta awrajja of the area of Tigray. Tedros has examined reviewing that as a kid he was mindful of the misery and passing brought about by intestinal sickness. His more youthful sibling kicked the bucket at 3 years old or 4 years of age, perhaps by a preventable ailment like measles, which Tedros regularly talks about as a characterizing involvement concerning the requirement for worldwide social insurance.
In 2017, after being elected director general of WHO, Tedros sought to improve the organization’s transparency and responsiveness and to bolster its resources. With global health challenges increasing in complexity, many experts agreed that WHO needed to overcome its tendency for slow bureaucratic-driven responses to health crises. In his first years at WHO, Tedros demonstrated an ability to persuade authoritarian governments to share information on outbreaks, helping advance international public heath relations. However, his praise for authoritarian leaders who made progress toward more effective disease control—and especially his tendency to seemingly ignore the deprivation and harm that those governments inflicted on their citizens—was a source of controversy. In particular, Tedros was criticized for his support of disease control measures implemented by the Chinese government during the COVID-19 pandemic. Health experts noted that China had mismanaged the disease early on, allowing it to escalate into a global outbreak, and claimed that Tedros did not act soon enough to prevent its spread out of China.
Ethiopia’s former health minister has been elected to serve as the next director-general of the World Health Organization — the first African picked to lead the global health agency.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, 52, will succeed Dr. Margaret Chan on July 1.
It took three rounds of secret-ballot voting for Tedros — who is known by his first name — to claim the top job on Tuesday. But from the start of balloting it was clear momentum was going his way.
He topped every vote, starting in January when the WHO’s executive board whittled a long list of six candidates down to the final three.
On Tuesday, he was the top vote-getter in a three-way faceoff, knocking Dr. Sania Nishtar, 54, of Pakistan, out of competition. He defeated Dr. David Nabarro, 67, of Britain in the final ballot, earning 133 votes to Nabarro’s 50. There were two abstentions.
After signing a contract and taking the oath of office, Tedros told the World Health Assembly — the annual meeting of WHO member countries — that he did a lot of listening as he crisscrossed the globe campaigning for the job. Among the things he heard: Countries want WHO to be more efficient and accountable, and the next director general needed focus his or her efforts on the most vulnerable of the world.
“I hear you and I will act on your messages,” he said. “Let’s get to work for a healthier world.”
Tedros inherited a big job when, in July 2017, he became the WHO’s first African Director-General in its 69-year history. He took over shortly after the end of a brutal West African Ebola outbreak that many critics argued could have been minimized had the WHO done a better job of containing infection at the beginning. Two years in, Tedros’ job hasn’t gotten much easier. Ebola is back again, this time in the Congo. Skepticism of vaccines is proliferating, primarily in Western countries, and contributing to a resurgence of preventable illnesses like measles. Climate change is threatening human health at every level. And–despite drastic improvements over the past few decades–the global health community still struggles to protect vulnerable groups, like young children and women in childbirth. The WHO itself has drawn criticism from some in the public-health world, who have spoken out against its perceived organizational inefficiencies and overspending. Tedros also made headlines when he appointed Zimbabwe’s authoritarian leader Robert Mugabe a WHO goodwill ambassador in 2017, a decision Tedros eventually reversed.
Tedros remains preternaturally calm in the face of all of this, pouring his energy into work and shrugging off suggestions that perhaps he should take a break sometimes. (When he does get a rare free moment, he says he spends time with his wife and five children in Geneva or reads leadership and management books.) He remains committed to a dizzying array of projects at the WHO, from eliminating cervical cancer globally to removing trans fats from the world’s food supply, and sees global health problems that are almost mind-bogglingly daunting in scope not as obstacles, but as the reason for playing the game.