The Director-General (DG) of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC), Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu has been appointed in the World Health Organisation (WHO) as Assistant Director-General of Health Emergency Intelligence.
Ihekweazu’s appointment would take effect from November 1, 2021.
This was disclosed in a letter signed by the Director-General of WHO, Tedros Ghebreyesus.
The letter reads in part, “I am pleased to welcome Dr Chikwe Ihekweazu as an Assistant Director-General for Health Emergency Intelligence from November 1, 2021.
“He will lead the work on strengthening pandemic and epidemic intelligence globally, including heading the WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence in Berlin.”
Ihekweazu was trained as an infectious disease epidemiologist and has more than 20 years of working experience in both private and public institutes such as United Kingdom’s Health Protection Agency, Germany’s Robert Koch Institute, and South African National Institute for Communicable Diseases.
He has been widely published in several medical peer-reviewed journals.
The letter further read, “Dr. Ihekweazu, a Nigerian national, who was born in Germany, is a graduate of the College of Medicine, University of Nigeria and has a Master’s in Public Health from Heinrich-Heine University, Dusseldorf, Germany. In 2003, he was awarded a Fellowship for the European Programme for Intervention Epidemiology Training (EPIET) and subsequently completed his Public Health specialization in the United Kingdom.”
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