Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-12-12-Speech-3-334"
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"en.20071212.30.3-334"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, AIDS remains one of the great plagues of the 21st century despite the international community’s exceptional efforts to combat it over the last 20 years, albeit with occasional periods of slackening.
Number 6 on the list of UN Millennium Development Goals, adopted in September 2000, is to halt and begin to reverse the spread of AIDS by 2015. However, the current situation in developing countries – and particularly in Africa where the death rate from AIDS is still rising – demands that we redouble our efforts if we are to achieve that target.
There are several potential avenues for European action here. Firstly, we can strengthen cooperation arrangements, particularly with local authorities in the southern hemisphere because it is only at local level that lasting solutions can be found with regard to caring for sufferers, preventing the disease, supplying medicines, running information and prevention campaigns, and generally managing health services so that they meet local people’s needs.
Secondly, we must find ways of tackling the shortage of health professionals in low-income countries. Europe needs to step in here with practical, properly funded programmes to enable health professionals to do the work they were trained for in their own countries, under proper conditions and within proper structures, with the necessary equipment and medicines.
Lastly, combating AIDS in the long term will require a firm commitment to give patients in developing countries access to the medicines they need at prices they can afford. Given that many AIDS patients in the southern hemisphere have already developed resistance to the first-generation drugs they have been treated with, it is essential to find ways of making the latest treatments available in generic form in low-income countries. For that reason I would ask the Commission specifically to ensure that bilateral and regional agreements currently being negotiated – especially EPAs – do not include any provisions that might make it harder for southern hemisphere countries to use all the flexibility available under the TRIPs agreement and the 2001 Doha Declaration for the purpose of protecting AIDS patients.
I have no more to say. The unacceptable situation of millions of people dying of AIDS every year demands that the European Union face up to its responsibilities. It is time to stop talking and to get to work."@en1
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