Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-02-13-Speech-4-048"
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"en.20030213.3.4-048"2
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"Mr President, I too would like to congratulate the rapporteur and all colleagues who have worked on this report for keeping this issue in the spotlight.
The rapporteur told you a story about a woman called Margot Cameron who came to see me eight years ago. She wandered in, nobody would listen to her, and we sat down and looked at the problem she had and started campaigning. It is a success story, because here we are today looking at legislation that we are putting through this Parliament, which is great.
I would like to tell you another story, which does not have such a happy ending. As I have said, this all happened eight years ago when Margot Cameron came to see me. We started campaigning and raised the issue at national level and finally took it to European level. By that time we had contacted groups throughout Europe and brought the issue to the Petitions Committee in 1998, though looking around this room and I do not see anybody who was at that Committee.
I remember going to that Committee and arguing, along with the women, for that petition. However, I also remember the Commission saying: 'sorry guv, nothing to do with us – it is a Member State issue'. That delay set us back years. It was 2001 before we got any satisfaction out of the Commission. In that period 28 000 further operations were carried out in the UK alone. It is estimated that 20 000 of those implants have either leaked or ruptured during that period. What happened as a result of that delay? We let down not only the women who had signed that petition, but also a lot of women who had gone down the road of getting implants.
This shows that we have to address these issues and problems more speedily when they arise and not let women suffer in the way they have in the past. Many Member States have banned trilucent implants and have banned saline implants. We have got to look in the future at a ban on silicone implants. Why? Because they affect people's health. If it were men getting the implants, there would be a ban tomorrow, but that is not happening because men are not getting them. I would like to make one final point. This report is entitled 'breast implants', but it is also possible to get silicone implants for other parts of the body, and they cause the same damage."@en1
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