Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-04-07-Speech-1-055"

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"Madam President, I should like first to apologise to the Commissioner for having been called out of the Chamber while he was speaking. Eighty years ago there was a link between major wars, disasters and a pandemic. No one knows at this stage exactly what will be the nature, and the possible spread, of the SARS disease. It appears to be resistant to treatment by antibiotics, to have a variable development and not necessarily to follow the course one would expect in terms of the vulnerability of the patients concerned. Healthy people are succumbing as fast as, or faster than, the very old and the very young. In these circumstances you, Commissioner, are now facing for the first time on the human front what you have faced three or four times in terms of animal diseases. Most of us in this House, like Mrs Malliori who has just spoken, will be looking now in this grave crisis for the setting-up of something like a rapid alert system bringing together all the preventive measures which the European Union countries can carry out themselves. As Mrs Malliori has just said, if – despite all the tragic possibilities – we can see this as an opportunity to bring closer together in some form of European health centre the process of monitoring and analysing this threat, which is certainly more serious and less known than anything we have seen in recent years, then that at least will mean that some good comes out of this problem. Thanks to the analysis of the data from Asia which have come to the Commissioner so far, we now know sufficient about the nature of the outbreak in Guangdong province last year, and the degree to which that may have gone through a cycle of its own which can now be analysed, to have some idea of how the disease should be captured and isolated here in Western Europe. It looks as though there are a number of peculiarities to this disease and I would hope that, being still relatively free from it, we can analyse in depth the cases that have arrived in the European Union. We are better placed than most to turn this into an epidemic which is curable, and not a pandemic which threatens us all."@en1
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