While Karel Styblo provided the technical basis for a feasible tuberculosis control strategy, the principles had te be translated into a policy package that was acceptable to national governments. This was clearly a task for the World Health Organization (WHO). Dr Arata Kochi became the head of the then minute tuberculosis program at WHO in 1988 and used with an extraordinary skill and political flair in using the situation of an upsurge of tuberculosis in some industrialized countries (notably the United States) to marshall the necessary interest and fainancial resources to translate the technical achievements established in The Union's collaborative program to a political and implementable agende throughout the world.
