Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-09-05-Speech-2-110"
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"en.20000905.9.2-110"2
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"Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, Commissioners, I shall indeed try to do as you say and talk about Aids.
Besides making antiretroviral medication available at reasonable prices to local health systems, access to treatment implies strengthening training actions, structural aid and support to patients’ associations. Admittedly, mother-child transmission prevention programmes remain essential, but there is still a need for massive implementation of projects to provide access to treatment for chronic infection, because who is going to raise these children after we have saved them from infection? Access to medication poses complex ethical, medical and socio-economic problems, even political and cultural problems, which we must try to overcome by respecting the people we are dealing with and regarding them as partners to cooperate with.
Major cooperation must be established between donors, recipients, the pharmaceutical industry and associations to provide the operational systems for access to treatment. Several initiatives have been launched. First, a Commission round table will be held in September on Aids, tuberculosis and malaria. A Japanese conference will also be held in the context of the G8 this autumn on these three diseases. Finally, there is a proposal for a United Nations General Assembly Special Session to be devoted to Aids before May 2002.
The presidency will support these initiatives to find lasting solutions to the problem of global and respectful responsibility for people suffering from the disease, by means of practical projects and partnership agreements with the countries concerned. Guaranteeing access to quality treatment, information and the necessary resources for all must be the aim of the European Community. Consideration of access to treatment is not new. The road is hard, but it must be travelled. We cannot succeed without everyone’s participation: the pharmaceutical industry, the bilateral and multilateral donors, and the countries involved. We know now that the epidemic can only be overcome through long-term commitment. That commitment is all the more necessary because it would not be just immoral and dangerous for development and the progress of humanity, it would threaten world peace and equilibrium if recent advances, especially in treatment, were just to benefit the richest countries.
Well, as you know, the Aids pandemic currently affects 33.6 million people, the majority of them living in developing countries. According to UNAIDS, 5.6 million new cases and 2.6 million deaths were notified in 1999, including 50% women. The epidemic has already wiped out the achievements of thirty years of development aid in the most affected countries. The most tragic consequences are in Africa. The African continent finally had the professionals and experts it so lacked at the time of independence. Now the disease has taken a heavy toll among those trained adults of working age.
We cannot ignore the immense loss of human investment this first generation of victims represents, a loss which goes beyond the personal tragedy suffered by the sick and their families. Nor do we forget the poorest and most destitute who are still deprived of treatment. No one can forget the testimony of Judge Edwin Cameron, a white, homosexual, HIV positive man on the bench of the South African High Court. He courageously came forward at the opening of the plenary session of the International AIDS Conference in Durban last July. Only his social standing and income give him access to the treatment which is unfortunately inaccessible to the majority of his compatriots. His testimony illustrates African injustice.
For around a decade, Africa has committed itself courageously to a difficult process of reform and structural adjustment. But the epidemic is putting a heavy burden on the care system, making the modernisation of the health sector even more difficult. Just when attempts are being made to establish methods of funding to guarantee better, more permanent services, the monstrous burden of AIDS falls on communities already assailed by the economic crisis, underdevelopment, an inadequate health structure and the lack of a social security system. So the issue of HIV-AIDS lies at the very heart of sustainable development. Aids decimates societies, threatens future generations and compromises economic growth. The members of the UN Security Council now regard the issue as an absolute priority.
Beyond Africa, the pandemic is global. Thirty-five million people live with the virus, but fewer than 500 000 have access to antiretroviral treatments. It has to be recognised that, even here, there is a deep gulf between rich and poor. Inequality of opportunity in terms of access to treatment, intolerable in itself, is all the more repugnant today because information circulates, and circulates fast, on this planet. Today everyone knows these treatments exist. Humanely, morally and politically it is not only desirable but crucial to seek solutions jointly with developing countries, which are suited to their situation, take account of their potential, and help them improve accessibility to these treatments, while pursuing cooperation in the areas of education, health, prevention, and the training of local medical staff.
The European Union has been aware since the beginning of the 1980s, of the need to give the developing countries practical assistance in the fight against HIV-AIDS, putting respect for the people affected, in particular the most vulnerable, at the centre of its concerns. Hence it has participated in implementing actions in the areas of transfusion safety, information campaigns, raising young people’s awareness, creation of documentation and information centres, as well as training and medical and social security benefits. Some countries, France in particular, are also involved in initiatives to facilitate access to treatment. The International Therapeutic Solidarity Fund has obtained encouraging initial results for the two access to medication programmes started in 1999 in Ivory Coast and Morocco. New programmes are now being launched in Senegal, Vietnam and South Africa. Even though these only affect a few individuals out of the millions of people in need, we feel sure they are contributing to international mobilisation and bringing in their wake the benefits of partnership and shared know-how. Their effects are already apparent in the mother-child prevention programmes set up by UNAIDS and UNICEF.
So the international context is evolving. The United Nations, its agencies and the World Bank are mobilising to strengthen international therapeutic solidarity. An important, even historic, agreement has been concluded between WHO, UNAIDS and five pharmaceutical companies. It means the price of medication used to treat Aids can be reduced. Similarly, the recent decision to make nevirapine, an antiretroviral molecule effective in the prevention of mother-child transmission, freely available adds credibility to that agreement, because it proves that this is not just an announcement, and the pharmaceutical industry really can take practical action.
Finally, many countries are recognising that the indebtedness of developing countries is an intolerable burden on their economies and acts as a brake on their capacity to combat poverty effectively, let alone the pandemic. France has taken specific steps to cancel that debt, while encouraging development and health education. Such initiatives show that the mobilisation of the international community is strengthening, and it must not slacken. But this is just a first stage in the struggle against the Aids pandemic. At the international congress last July in Durban, on African territory, researchers, health professionals, non-governmental organisation campaigners and political leaders, were all unanimous in emphasising the urgency of the situation. Contact with helpless health professionals, the resigned distress of mothers who have infected their own children, the powerlessness of the health authorities to act, visiting a paediatric hospital – all that further convinced me of the extent of the gulf between the inhabitants of the countries of the South and their fellow human beings who chanced to be born in our own countries.
New commitment is necessary. We are convinced of that. International aid must be strengthened urgently in the fight against HIV-AIDS. Coordination of all resources at all levels remains one of the top priorities for international aid within the framework of the strategies defined at international level, in partnership with national Aids programmes and other donors. We must urgently strengthen prevention programmes, improve the research effort geared to developing countries and give all patients real access to treatment."@en1
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