PEOPLE: WHO Official Fights To Stem Bird Flu Pandemic

Saturday, February 7, 2009

GENEVA (Nikkei)--A pandemic of avian influenza, or bird flu, is feared to one day infect billions of people around the globe. Dr. Nahoko Shindo, a medical officer at the World Health Organization, is among those who would be the first to know about such a devastating outbreak. Her job is to go to the site of an outbreak to examine patients, collect information and report it back to the WHO headquarters in Geneva. She also helps build local quarantine systems to prevent the spread of infection.

Since 2002, Shindo has been at the front lines of the fight against the viruses that cause serious illnesses like Ebola hemorrhagic fever, which spread in Africa; severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which broke out suddenly in Asia; and avian influenza, which is being closely monitored by health officials around the world. The 45-year-old Shindo is an infection specialist, highly praised by WHO Director-General Margaret Chan.

Nahoko Shindo

Even with a protective suit, goggles and a high-performance face mask, there is no guarantee with today's medical technologies that Shindo and others working closely with highly contagious diseases will not be infected themselves. When there is an outbreak of an infectious disease in a region of conflict, Shindo travels there on a United Nations helicopter. Each time, she is literally putting her life at risk.

A single mother, Shindo naturally thinks about her 14-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter. However, she says she likes "the tension of devoting my entire self in an instant."

Shindo is driven by a sense of duty, remembering what her brother, four years her junior who had malignant brain tumor, told her one day in his hospital room: "I'm going to die soon, so I want you to become a medical doctor to tell others who are suffering from diseases like me that they have a tomorrow."

Her brother's condition suddenly worsened, and this turned out to be their last conversation.

Shindo, who was a junior in high school that time, had no plans for a medical career and chose engineering as her major in college. But she could not forget her brother's request, and she reapplied for medical school. After working at a university hospital as a physician and at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, she passed the highly competitive application system for the WHO [.d] where, that time, only one in 617 was accepted [.d] and became a full-time employee at the organization.

Since the start of 2009, cases of bird flu infections have increased in China, in addition to Indonesia and Vietnam. "There's not enough information about infection routes from the areas affected by the disease," Shindo noted. Her battle against deadly diseases is clearly far from over.