Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-01-30-Speech-4-047"
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"en.20030130.2.4-047"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, first of all, my compliments to Mr Wijkman for his excellent report and its tangible contribution to the fight against poverty-related diseases, a report, moreover, adopted by the unanimous vote of the Committee on Development and Cooperation. This is further confirmation of the need to speed up the adoption, which seems to be possible at first reading already, of this proposal for a regulation so that it can be swiftly implemented, in line with the European Union’s responsibilities to developing countries.
This is certainly a substantial contribution – albeit not to a large enough degree – to the recently constituted Global Fund to Fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, a fund strongly called for by the Italian Prime Minister too during the G8 Summit in Genoa and – I would add – which was made available in record time compared with the time which these things usually take. I am afraid, however, that the situation is still alarming and there is no time to lose: we still can and must do much more.
I will not tire of repeating, once again, that we need a coordinated approach between policies on development cooperation, research and health in the fight against these diseases, including through developing third countries’ health systems. Everyone is aware of the facts, and among these I would highlight this one: each day, between 12 and 14 thousand people contract the AIDS virus throughout the world. As Mr Deva rightly said, this is a disease which has now also arrived on our doorstep: just think of the thousands of children in Romania who have contracted this virus. Therefore, although this is a global problem, it nevertheless affects developing countries in particular.
So while the budget represents the main obstacle to the adoption of this proposal for a regulation as amended, I would like briefly to consider a key element: the issue of drugs, their cost and access to treatment and medicines. How can it be that, even now, only 10% of both public and private research is dedicated to studying these diseases which are responsible for a good 90% of disease in developing populations? I wonder what became of my request, which I submitted along with Mr Tajani more than two years ago, which called in this very forum for the urgent drafting of a common plan, in conjunction with the pharmaceutical manufacturers, that focused more on combating poverty diseases. Given the scale and cross-border nature of the phenomenon – now on our doorstep – these poverty diseases call for a systematic response from the whole international community."@en1
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