
GENEVA -- Eighteen years ago, Nahoko Shindo was brought into the World Health Organization to fight pandemics. Since then, her battle experience includes fighting SARS, avian influenza, the Indian Ocean Tsunami, the deadly viral hemorrhagic fever outbreaks in Africa, and more recently, the 2009 influenza pandemic.
She is an infectious disease specialist, who previously was chief researcher at Japan's National Institute of Infectious Diseases, the country's equivalent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the U.S.