According to a report from the Wall Street Journal,"there are few awards in the field of tuberculosis treatment, where doctors can spend years trying to cure patients, only to watch many die. Tsetan Sadutshang appeared to be one of the chosen few when he was told in October by the organization that oversees the Kochon Prize, a prestigious honor for major contributions to the fight against TB, that the TB program he leads tentatively had been selected a winner".
"Based at a hospital in Dharamsala, India, at the foot of the Himalayas, the Tibetan Tuberculosis Control Program treats Tibetans in exile as well as Indian patients. Despite high rates of TB and drug-resistant TB in the community, the program says 93% of its patients in 2012 were either confirmed cured or were well after their treatment ended.
"We have one of the highest rates of TB in the world," said Dr. Sadutshang, chief medical officer of the Tibetan Delek Hospital and personal physician to the Dalai Lama. "One of the biggest health problems in the Tibetan community is TB."
Yet Dr. Sadutshang's program wasn't given the award, in a turn of events illustrating a collision of politics and public health.
While the Kochon Prize selection committee of TB experts chose the Tibetan program, according to people close to the selection process, the winner must be approved by the director-general of the World Health Organization, Margaret Chan. A WHO spokesman confirmed this and said the WHO administration, which advises the director-general, didn't approve the choice because the hospital has ties to the Tibetan government-in-exile. The Central Tibetan Administration, as that entity is known, isn't recognized by the United Nations. The WHO is the U.N.'s public-health agency."The WHO is not able to recognize any entity that is not in turn recognized as a legal authority by the UN," said WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl in response to a question. He said the prize committee's selection was reviewed by the WHO administration's legal department.
China also objected to the choice of winner, according to people familiar with the selection process, calling the TB program a political organization because it was linked to the government in exile, an entity China asserts threatens its sovereignty over Tibet".
The $65,000 prize, which would have been shared with another winner, would have helped the Tibetan TB program fund treatment for patients and possibly apply for grants from larger funding agencies, said Kunchok Dorjee, who directed the program through September and now advises it while in graduate school. "It would have really helped us run our program and save a number of lives," he said.
