Zsuzsanna Jakab

Zsuzsanna Jakab (born May 17, 1951, Budapest, Hungary) is a Hungarian epidemiologist who served as director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) from 2005 to 2010. In 2019 she became deputy director general of the World Health Organization (WHO).

Jakab’s father was a surgeon, and her mother was an agronomist. She studied political and social sciences at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest for five years, earning the equivalent of a master’s degree in 1974. She later earned two postgraduate degrees, including one in macroeconomics, political sciences, and the history of religions from the University of Political Sciences, Budapest, in 1979. In 1999 she received a diploma for two foundation courses in public health from the Nordic School of Public Health in Gothenburg, Sweden. Beginning in 1975, she held a variety of posts in Hungary’s Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, working as a liaison to international organizations, most notably the World Health Organization. In 1991 she accepted a post in the WHO’s regional office for Europe in Copenhagen, where she rose to director of administration in 2000. In 2002 she was invited to return to Budapest to serve as secretary of state in Hungary’s Ministry of Health, where she assisted with the country’s integration into the European Union (EU).

Jakab assumed leadership of the newly formed ECDC in 2005, taking on the task of defending the people living in EU member countries against infectious diseases. Jakab’s lack of medical and scientific expertise was unusual for a person overseeing a disease centre, but the ECDC had no regulatory authority nor laboratories and therefore conducted no medical research of its own. Instead, one of its main functions was to influence the formation of EU health policy. Jakab’s extensive background in public health administration was expected to serve her well as she negotiated the EU bureaucracy. Jakab’s appointment was seen as politically significant; she was the first citizen of one of the 10 states that joined the EU in 2004 to head an EU agency.

Working out of ECDC headquarters in Stockholm, Jakab began to develop a surveillance network that could collect health data from, and coordinate disease prevention among, the 25 countries of the EU. At a time when borders within the EU were becoming more open, the spread of infectious diseases—such as HIV/AIDS, SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), and bird flu (avian influenza)—posed an ever-growing threat to public health. Jakab exhorted EU member countries to improve their vaccination programs so that the spread of easily preventable diseases such as measles would be slowed. In 2007 she organized the first scientific conference held by the ECDC. Three years later Jakab stepped down as ECDC director and became the WHO’s regional director for Europe. She was appointed to a second term in 2015. In 2019 she left that post and became deputy director general of the WHO. One of the challenges Jakab and the WHO subsequently faced was the emergence of the coronavirus disease COVID-19, which the organization designated a pandemic in 2020.