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		</div><p>A former Ethiopian health minister has been elected to lead the World Health Organization.</p>
<p>Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus beat Briton David Nabarro and Sania Nishtar of Pakistan in the race to be named WHO director-general.</p>
<p>He succeeds China&#8217;s Margaret Chan, who is ending a 10-year tenure at the UN health agency.</p>
<p>The director-general wields considerable power in setting medical priorities that affect billions of people and declaring when crises like disease outbreaks evolve into global emergencies.</p>
<p>The agency has stumbled in recent years, most notably in its error-prone response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in west Africa, and all three candidates vowed to overhaul its organisation to restore credibility.</p>
<p>Before voting started, Mr Tedros, the only non-medical doctor among the three finalists, said it was almost &#8220;pure luck&#8221; that he was competing to lead WHO.</p>
<p>He said that when he was growing up in Ethiopia, his seven-year-old brother was killed by a common childhood disease, and it easily could have been him.]</p>
<p>Among his pledges, Mr Tedros said he would work &#8220;tirelessly to fulfil WHO&#8217;s promise of universal health care&#8221;.</p>
<p>His humble background, he said, taught him to refuse &#8220;to accept that people should die because they&#8217;re poor&#8221;.</p>
<p><b>&#8220;There is real value in electing a leader who has worked in one of the toughest environments,&#8221;</b> Mr Tedros said, adding that he could <b>&#8220;bring an angle the world has never seen before&#8221;.</b></p>
<p>The former health minister has been dogged by allegations that he covered up cholera outbreaks in Ethiopia, and protesters have occasionally interrupted proceedings at the meeting in Geneva this week.</p>
<p>But Mr Tedros received a boost from Dr Thomas Frieden, an ex-director of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.</p>
<p>He wrote a letter published in the New York Times last week that commended Mr Tedros for his creation of a network of 40,000 female health workers that implemented programmes to save people from dying of diarrhoea and other causes.</p>
<p>Of the UN health agency&#8217;s 194 member states, 185 were eligible to cast ballots; nine others were either in arrears on their dues or not represented at the gathering.</p>
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