It is a pleasure for me to welcome you to Geneva and to our Headquarters of the World Health Organization. We are pleased to host this interagency consultation, organized together with our colleagues in UNDP, and I hope that you will have a fruitful meeting over the next two days.

Disability is on the agenda of all the agencies and organizations assembled here today; still, this group represents only a fraction of all interested parties, dealing with the disability issue, in one form or another.

An impressive voluntary input is given in many societies to allow for increased activities and participation of people with disabilities. However, at your meeting here, you will have an opportunity to consider the necessary commitment of governments to overcoming the medical, social, economic and developmental implications of disability. One of the questions you may wish to address is how the UN-system, with its collaborating nongovernmental organizations, can best serve the future challenges of disability.

Our present estimate is that 7-10% of the global population has a disability, with social, educational and/or economic consequences; it is a staggering figure, implying that there may be more than 500 million people around the world with special needs in terms of health care, education, rehabilitation, and social support, to be given equal opportunities for a productive life. Furthermore, there is a clear link between poverty and disability.

The complexity of this challenge illustrates why there is a need for inputs from a number of partners.

In WHO, disability has been on the agenda since the inception of the organization; there have been several World Health Assembly resolutions on disability prevention and rehabilitation. The emphasis of WHO has been on the prevention of disability and the general promotion and protection of health. Although in the past, most statistics of WHO tended to deal only with morbidity and mortality, this will now change. As part of the reform of WHO, priorities are now more well-defined, and clearly linked to the global burden of disease, and the collaborative effort between the World Bank and WHO. This includes consideration being given to the measure of Disability Adjusted Life Years, which, although imperfect , gives a useful indication of the true impact of disease burden. Thus, our new emphasis on Mental Health is in recognition of the very significant disability implications of mental disease, in particular depression. Furthermore, our new grouping, into one department, of programmatic areas directly involved with disabilities, such as blindness and deafness prevention, together with violence and injury prevention and rehabilitation, allows for closer collaboration between the relevant teams. WHO has been in the forefront of developing community-based rehabilitation (CBR) for a number of years; this must be part of a continuum of care and support for prevention and rehabilitation and the equalization of opportunities. Overall, we are now paying even more attention to the social dimension of health, as reflected in the creation of the cluster on Social Change and Mental Health, where these departments are located, together with the team dealing with ageing and health.

As you may be aware, the theme for this year's World Health Day is "Active Ageing". It carries a message not only in relation to disability, which is often age-related, but also for the continuing participation of older persons in all facets of social interaction. This is particularly important, as we are going to witness a formidable "greying" of the world population over the next generation; it is therefore timely that we move away from old myths about ageing as necessarily meaning a less active life, with disabilities and exclusion from social participation.

The WHO priority directions include attention to all ages and population groups, with a very significant impact on future disability prevention. The eradication of poliomyelitis is now entering its final phase, and will soon become a global reality. Furthermore, the initiatives to "Stop Tuberculosis" and for "HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections" are making good progress. The new "Roll-Back Malaria" and "Tobacco-Free Initiative" are other examples of global action, which will have a great impact in terms of disease and disability reduction, while at the same time promoting health as part of sustainable development.

Disability is not only a medical and social issue; it also has a human rights dimension, including non-discrimination of people with disabilities. This has a direct bearing on the participation of Disabled Peoples and their Organizations in decision-making, including broad multisectoral issues such as education and employment. In this context, WHO is firmly committed to support the "World Programme of Action concerning Disabled Persons (1982)" and we are taking on part of the monitoring of the UN Standard Rules, in relation to our mandate as a specialized agency. We are also presently developing a policy instrument on disability, which we will be prepared to share with you, at a later stage when our in-house consultations have been completed.

As I have pointed out, since I took up my post in WHO, we are "reaching out", to form new partnerships, to become more effective globally by working together. Disabilities, from the preventive to the social dimensions, is obviously an area where well-functioning partnerships can have a critical impact. I shall therefore be particularly interested in your conclusions and recommendations on how we can work more closely together in the future and what new achievements could be made possible through such a collaboration. The creation of a global partnership to honour our commitment to disability, could be one of the most useful contributions a group like this could make, for the well-being of all people in the next millennium.