Address to Members of the European Parliament
Members of the European Parliament,
Thank you for giving me this opportunity to meet with you today, and to tell you about the work of the World Health Organization.
I will comment briefly on why our partnership with the European Union and the European Commission is so important, why WHO is needed – more than ever – and why we need strong, sustained political and financial support from the European Union, and technical support from EU institutions.
Economic, technological, political, and environmental developments continue to have a profound influence – both positive and negative – on the health of populations. Current threats to health include: global pandemics such as AIDS; poverty, conflicts, and disasters; inequitable distribution of resources such as food and safe drinking-water; and environmental degradation. The world today is very different from that of 1948, when WHO came into being. The tragic events of the Second World War, which had such a devastating impact on Europe, led to the United Nations Charter, and the establishment of the UN as a means of promoting global justice and security. As a UN agency, our WHO constitution gives us the objective of "the attainment by all peoples of the highest possible level of health".
WHO is an organization of 192 Member States. I was elected by these Member States to the position of Director-General earlier this year. I am accountable to our Member States through the World Health Assembly, which meets annually.
Our mandate includes research, standard-setting, advocacy for healthy public policies, capacity-building, surveillance and monitoring. We work with governments and a broad range of partners from industry, NGOs, foundations and academia. We have a network of offices, with our headquarters in Geneva and six regional offices for Europe, Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean, South-East Asia, the Western Pacific, and the Americas. Many of you are aware of the excellent collaboration between the EU and our European Regional Office in Copenhagen. We are working as partners to implement the EU Public Health Programme.
We have 147 country offices enabling us to provide close support to Member States. A major WHO objective is to help less developed countries build capacity to provide access to effective primary health care services, especially to the poor, and particularly women and children. Basic health services are crucial to scale up action to control HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, to make motherhood safe, and to promote child survival. But health systems in many countries are close to collapse, owing to chronic under-funding, conflict, and loss of frontline health workers due to HIV/AIDS and the brain drain. The need is great, yet our budget for all these activities is just over 1 billion euros a year – little more than the university hospital in Geneva. And less than half of that comes as assessed contributions. For the rest we are dependent on the goodwill of voluntary contributions from donors.
In 1948, few would have denied that multilateralism was fundamental to justice and security. Fifty-five years later some challenge that basic assumption. But evidence of the continued need for multilateral approaches to uphold justice and security is more abundant than ever. Two examples from our work in global health can give some idea of it.
Seven months ago, on March the twelfth, WHO alerted the world to the appearance of a severe respiratory illness of unknown cause, that was rapidly spreading among hospital staff in Viet Nam, China and Hong Kong. Within two days, it was clear that the disease was spreading internationally along major airline routes, as cases were reported from Canada and Singapore. We had to act quickly, and we did. We had to stop the spread of the infection, so we issued advisories warning against unnecessary travel to affected areas. Through our global network of laboratories and clinicians, we quickly identified the organism. We developed early diagnostic tests. We recommended interventions to stop the spread of the disease. Many European countries worked closely with us, and we enjoyed excellent collaboration with the EU and particularly with Commissioner Byrne and his staff in SANCO. Our joint efforts were successful, and the epidemic was stopped.
Would SARS have been stopped without WHO? No. A global problem demands a global response, and a global agency to lead and coordinate that response. We have fulfilled that role and we will continue to do so in the future. Since I took office three months ago, I have made the focus of my work one of the greatest threats to health this world has ever faced – AIDS. Forty-two million people are now infected with HIV. Families, communities and nations are being devastated. For those unfortunate to be HIV-positive but fortunate to live in the richer countries of the West, treatment is now available, and a long and productive live is still possible. But the vast majority of people with HIV/AIDS live in the least-developed countries of the world, and don’t have access to treatment. Six million are in desperate need of antiretrovirals to save them from premature death.
Last month I took the unusual step of declaring a global public health emergency. I called for immediate action to reach the target of ‘3 by 5’ – to have 3 million people with AIDS in developing countries on treatment with antiretrovirals by 2005. Only 300 000 are on treatment at the moment. Whether we are guided by the moral imperative to reduce human suffering or the seemingly more practical one of enlightened self-interest, we have to take action immediately to control this devastating epidemic. As with SARS, this demands a multilateral approach. No one country or region has the resources or know-how to meet this need.
The SARS outbreak and the response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic are just two examples of the critical role of WHO in protecting the health of the world. There are many others. If we didn’t already have a World Health Organization, we would have to invent one.
We greatly appreciate EU support for the United Nations, including the WHO. This is a historic period as the EU enlarges to become an entity consisting of 450 million people in 25 countries. It will soon have the world’s greatest economic output, and be the world's largest provider of development assistance. Our concerns for security and justice through viable health systems are the same. We need to work together even more closely. I look forward to continuing the dialogue we have started today.
Thank you.