Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-09-03-Speech-3-272"
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"en.20030903.11.3-272"2
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".
Mr President, today the world's gaze is very much on world trade. However, for millions that is a million miles from their broken, infected and disabled lives, because you can only trade if you can make, grow, sell and distribute. Those tasks are essential to your economic wellbeing and to your country's economic growth. They are tasks which are way beyond you if you are physically or mentally ill or disabled. If they are beyond you, you are in a downward spiral to poverty and, more often than not, to death. Health and wealth, ill-health and poverty are inextricably entwined. Poverty leads to ill-health and ill-health means poverty for nations, families and individuals. Without health you cannot create wealth and without wealth you cannot prevent and cure disease.
We, the countries of the European Union, have accepted the challenge to help the least- and the less-developed countries to overcome poverty and to become partners with us in world trade and development. We have acknowledged the fundamental link between good health and the reduction in poverty and we now need to enhance this priority in our development policies.
The Commission has sent us a good communication, which I welcome. It focuses on the three massive challenges of TB, AIDS and malaria and nothing in my report contradicts that focus. Indeed, I call for more and better investment in these areas.
However, there are other enormous health challenges we must also address. Let me start with the final point in our report. We, the developed world, are short of doctors. Each and every year we make up our domestic failure by recruiting 63 000 doctors from the developing countries. In return, we send them just 1 300. This is unacceptable.
Then let me re-emphasise the need for a shift in resources to basic health, if our rhetoric is to be translated into effective action. Just 3.4% of our current development budgets go to health. That is simply inadequate. Only 9 of the first 61 country strategy papers had health as a focal area for cooperation. That will not achieve results.
We need resources, but they must be efficiently targeted. Drugs, for example, are wasted if not accompanied by adequate storage, distribution, monitoring and patient education. Nigeria is an example where dramatic improvement was possible in fatal childhood diseases once the programme developed a home-to-home strategy and changed the public perception about immunisation.
Then there are the diseases and disorders beyond the three priorities of TB, AIDS and malaria. By 2020, 80% of the global burden of disease will be non-communicable diseases: cardiovascular, cancer, respiratory, diabetes, depression, epilepsy, etc. Diarrhoea diseases kill 1.5 million children a year.
We heard in the last debate about water. Apart from malaria, water-borne diseases that debilitate and destroy include typhoid, dysentery, cholera, hepatitis, trachoma, fluorosis and Japanese encephalitis. Yet 1.1 billion people have no access to clean water and 2.4 billion are without hygienic sanitation. Yet the cost need not be prohibitive, and our report points to examples of inexpensive interventions and changes of local practice which can make a significant difference.
I am grateful to colleagues from all parts of the House who suggested additions or amendments – most of which we were able to incorporate in committee – and a few which I have accepted and put my name on at this plenary stage. I would also like to thank the governments, academics, practitioners and NGOs – not least from the developing countries themselves – for their contributions. They confirmed many of the proposals I had drafted and suggested new areas for me to explore, such as vaccines, maternal health, biomass fuels and palliative care. I hope Parliament will endorse our report and that the Council and the Commission will see it as supportive as well as exhortative. None of us can be satisfied with our efforts to date to defeat poverty by promoting good health. We are all in development mode and our commitment must be to drive our policy forward and faster. It is in all our interests to make real and lasting progress."@en1
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