Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-01-13-Speech-2-323"
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"en.20040113.14.2-323"2
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"Madam President, I thank the rapporteur for an excellent report and for continuing to show her interest in and commitment to these issues. Like her I welcome the Commission's continuing focus on action against and treatment of HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria.
The programme which was launched in 2001 has produced some very important and impressive results. We need in this report and in this Parliament to reiterate the importance of continuing this emphasis on tackling these particular diseases in the context of our poverty eradication efforts. It is absolutely crucial to recognise the importance of this concentration of effort on these diseases, which, as others have said very graphically this evening, claim so many lives and cause so much suffering.
I trust the Commission will continue its efforts to build the necessary political will, based since 2001 on an increasing knowledge of what actually works in the field at this time. There remains a greater need for donor resources and for national resources, and the Commission must continue to argue for more commitments to fight AIDS, to the programme and to the Global Health Fund from bilateral programmes.
I welcome the acknowledgement, as the rapporteur and others have already agreed in the report, of what is arguably the most neglected crisis spawned by the HIV/AIDS pandemic – the plight of millions of profoundly vulnerable children who have been orphaned by the disease. The numbers, as some of us have already seen in the field, are overwhelming the capacity of families and communities to cope.
We are clearly facing a development catastrophe at the hands of the AIDS pandemic. There is no better gauge of its scale and cruelty than the orphan crisis. I urge the Commission to compile data on the impact of all these diseases on children and women.
All of these efforts will not be assisted by the dangerous misinformation pedalled by the Roman Catholic Church with its pseudo-scientific pronouncements about the spermatozoa passing through the net formed by a condom. This nonsense, alongside US views on the need for abstention before marriage, is incorrect and quite simply dangerous. US policies are not saving lives: they are only pandering to the fundamentalist conservative voters at home.
Kofi Annan has described the AIDS crisis as being an issue of weapons of mass destruction. There is a great deal to do, and it will require substantial funding from our programmes in developing countries. AIDS has to be a core theme of our development assistance."@en1
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