2006年NPR美国国家公共电台十一月-Chinese Doctor Nominated to Run the WHO

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Here is a signal that China may be assuming a larger role in global politics. The World Health Organization is set to name Doctor Margaret Chan as Director General, and she is the nominee¹ of China. NPR's Brenda Wilson reports.

Doctor Margaret Chan is the first Chinese national to hold a top United Nation's position. Two years ago she joined the Communicable Diseases Division of the World Health Organization to develop a plan for dealing² with an influenza³ pandemic. She was hired by Dr. Lee Jong-Wook who died unexpectedly last spring. After she was selected by the Executive Board in Geneva yesterday, she promised to work tirelessly to honor his commitment to World Health.

I have the commitment, the passion and the humility⁴ to serve the member states of this organization, this great organization. I also have the determination to achieve results for health. I'm sure we have the power to do so. We just need to be very smart in our planning and priority setting, and most of all, be streetwise in our actions.

She is a bird flu expert who has won her stripes the hard way, dealing with a series of major disease outbreaks as Hong Kong's Health Director. An avian flu epidemic⁵ in 1997 that earned her a reputation for being able to take decisive action. Doctor Robert Webster, a virologist with St. Jude's Research Hospital, worked with Doctor Chan in Hong Kong during that outbreak.

Margaret is a listener and makes people work together. She gets at the nitty-gritty of the question and makes decisions that, that are sometimes hard decisions, and I think can deal with the cultural bridge, which is real between the societies. And I think that that's what she has to offer.

Specifically he is talking about difficulties between Hong Kong and Beijing, and between China and the wider world. Some in Hong Kong were critical of what they perceived to be, her slowness in getting Chinese officials to be more open about what was going on during the bird flu outbreak. In the end, hundreds of thousands of poultry⁶ had to be slain⁷.

The poultry marketers at that time were very upset that their markets were shut for three months. She had to pull all the information together: from agriculture, from the Health Department, from the university and, and make the decision to slaughter⁸ all the poultry in Hong Kong, that the decision was really Margaret's in the end, and again was criticized.

She was similarly decisive and successful in getting the SARS epidemic under control. A gargantuan⁹ bureaucratic¹⁰ challenge also awaits her at WHO. The organization's regional offices have built their own fiefdoms among the Ministries¹¹ of Health of countries in their regions, and they don't always take direction from the Director General. That's hurt WHO's reputation. NS of the Global Health Council says that in the two years she's been in Geneva, she has won the respect of the people she'll have to work with.

I don't think it's an accident that she has risen to this very high level. She tends to do things by consensus¹² and with a smile rather than by fiat¹³. And I, I think that will tend to work well as long as she has a clear vision of where she is going.

Doctor Chan's term begins Jan 4 2007. Brenda Wilson, NPR News.
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streetwise
Having the shrewd awareness¹⁴, experience, and resourcefulness needed for survival in a difficult, often dangerous urban environment.
适应都市环境的：在一困难，经常有危险的都市环境中有生存所需要的机敏的意识，经验或才智的
stripe
（表示等级的）臂章，肩章
virologist
病毒学家
nitty-gritty
事实真相, 本质
gargantuan
Of immense size, volume, or capacity; gigantic.See Synonyms at enormous
fiat
命令, 法令, 许可, 批准