Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-06-18-Speech-1-206"
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"en.20070618.19.1-206"2
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".
Madam President, the European Parliament has dealt with health issues on a number of occasions. However, the view is often expressed that Parliament should focus on general health issues, such as medical treatment, insurance and appropriate care for those both ill and healthy. People sometimes say that it should not concern itself with specific diseases. However, I think that the disease being discussed today, namely multiple sclerosis, is a problem on such a dramatic scale that Parliament’s involvement is justified. Neither is it the first time that the European Parliament is taking action in this field.
A few weeks ago, on 29 May of this year, a conference was organised in Brussels by the European MS Platform. This conference was held under the auspices of the President of the European Parliament, Mr Hans-Gert Pöttering, for which we thank him, and was organised by Mrs Uma Aaltonen. I would like to remind you that Mrs Uma Aaltonen was once one of our colleagues. She was a Member of the European Parliament and a member of the Committee on Petitions, of which I am the chairman. Mrs Uma Aaltonen suffers from multiple sclerosis herself. She is a writer, a journalist and a teacher, and particularly supports this cause.
I would like to remind you that the Committee on Petitions dealt with the issue of multiple sclerosis in petition 842/2001. As a result of this petition, the Committee on Petitions produced a report which was discussed in Parliament during the December plenary session in 2003. Thanks to our cooperation with multiple sclerosis associations in all the Member States and the European Multiple Sclerosis Platform, a code of best practice was drawn up on the basis of this report and the resolution which accompanied it.
The matter is really extremely important as the tragic situation facing multiple sclerosis sufferers is not reflected in statistics. As the participants at this conference pointed out, and as we heard during our previous debate on the subject, mortality statistics often state as the cause of death the failure of the pulmonary or the cardiovascular system, but do not mention that the primary cause of the pulmonary failure was simply muscular paralysis and that the patient suffocated, or that the cause of the cardiovascular failure was multiple sclerosis.
Therefore, the statistics often do not provide us with the relevant information about how many people are seriously ill, how many suffer and how many die as a result of this illness. Multiple sclerosis sufferers are ill for many years. In the end, the cause of their death, statistically speaking, it pains me to say, is an entirely different disease. The Committee on Petitions met multiple sclerosis sufferers, we participated in these conferences and, during our mission to Berlin, we met the Minister of State of the German Government, Günter Gloser, with whom we discussed the matter, as the petitions committee of the German parliament is also dealing with the issue.
Today, I would like to put a question to the Commission and to ask it to state the means, methods and efforts that it has undertaken to implement the European Parliament’s resolution and the code of good practice that was drawn up on the basis of the resolution. I would be very grateful if the Commissioner could answer this question."@en1
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