Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-02-22-Speech-2-193"
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"en.20050222.13.2-193"2
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"Madam President, many thanks are due to Mrs Ries for her hard work on this report.
Human health, both physical and mental, is directly related to the environment we live in. Most disease processes are the result of interactions between our bodies and various environmental factors. This is common sense. An environment and health action plan should have two main goals: firstly, to identify quickly the main environmental health risk factors and, secondly, to eliminate or minimise their effect on human health as soon as possible. This is also common sense.
The action plan proposed by the Commission is, unfortunately, more planning and less action. It is principally concerned with improving information and research relating to environmental pollutants and disease causation, and enhancing environment health communication procedures between Member States. It eventually aims to help improve human health. Is this common sense? On one hand yes, because information, research and cooperation in environment-health interaction matters are always a good thing
we do not necessarily need more time- and money-consuming, research-related mechanisms in order to act fast and save lives now.
We already know which main environment hazards kill people, so it would be common sense to concentrate first on these and try to eliminate them quickly and efficiently. An obvious example is smoking. We know that both active and passive smoking kills hundreds of thousands of people in Europe every year. We also know that the only effective way to reduce the deadly habit of smoking is to drastically increase the price of cigarettes, to ban cigarette advertising completely and to stop our farmers from producing tobacco.
Is this what we are doing? Not quite! A packet of cigarettes is still relatively cheap in many EU Member States; cigarette advertising, in particular indirect advertising, which is more effective because it acts subconsciously, is still happening and we are still subsidising many of our farmers to grow tobacco. This is definitely not common sense.
In conclusion, I say 'yes' to research and information for combating long-term environment-related diseases we do not know much about, but I urge the Commission to say 'yes' to immediate drastic action to prevent the diseases we already are very familiar with today."@en1
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