The WHO’s SA-born Africa director knows the invisible enemy is perhaps the most serious health crisis she will face
World Health Organisation regional director for Africa Matshidiso Moeti. Picture: REUTERS/DENIS BALIBOUSE
“In those very early days when it [HIV] was very stigmatised, you had to keep absolutely secret who was infected,” she told Business Day in an interview. Decades later Moeti faced her second notable public health challenge, in part as the then new and first female regional director of the WHO in Africa.
While the spread in Africa, which has more than 47,000 cases, has been far less rapid than in Europe, the US and China, where it originated, the continent faces extreme challenges in its response. Even developed economies have taken a beating as they tried to contain and mitigate the devastation caused by the spread of the disease. In addition, the politics involved in public health at this scale is also no small challenge.
She says she relies heavily on her team to ensure the rest of what the WHO in Africa has to do gets done while the world comes to grips with the reality of Covid-19.While public health has consumed her adult life, it was “by accident” that she ended up working in it. As a young high school girl she wanted to be a physicist, then ended up studying medicine and dreaming of specialising as a paediatrician.
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