New diseases like SARS and bird flu cause anxiety in the community. People get worried, some to the extent that it even affects their health. You feel very sad, and yet you must carry on and maintain your cool in very trying and difficult moments. You have to tough it out.

The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, and the related Accra Agenda for Action, are useful policy instruments that set out the mutual responsibilities of donors and recipient countries.

The WHO is the lead agency in health in the United Nations system, and clearly we have very important functions to play.

The way I look at - speaking as a woman - I understand what it means to be a daughter, and to be a wife, and to be a mother, and also to be a career woman. The multiple roles that women can play in a society if given the opportunity is really a tremendous asset.

At a time of multiple calamities in the world, we cannot allow the loss of essential antimicrobials, essential cures for many millions of people, to become the next global crisis.

...we hope to stop the transmission in six to nine months

A health system that lacks commodities for managing high-mortality infectious diseases and the main killers of mothers and young children will not have an adequate impact. By the same token, even the best-stocked delivery system will have an inadequate impact if it fails to reach the poor.