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President and Mrs Carter, Excellencies, Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen:
Statues are monuments to things past, created to ensure that we don’t
forget the sacrifices and achievements that have led us to victory, long after
the sounds of battle have subsided.
There are many monuments for wars and battles throughout history, but a
statue to commemorate a disease is very rare.
This makes me all the more proud to be here today. River blindness is no
longer a public health problem or an impediment to socio-economic development in
the eleven West African countries that only a few years ago were seriously
affected by the disease.
This statue, which you will also find at the headquarters of Merck & Co.,
at the World Bank in Washington and at the Carter Center, shows what river
blindness did to millions of people before large‑scale control began in
Africa and in the Americas.
When the Onchocerciasis Control Programme comes to an end in the year 2002,
12 million children born since the beginning of control operations will have
grown up without the risk of infection by river blindness. Twenty-five million
hectares of fertile land, previously deserted for fear of the disease, are now
available for cultivation, enough to feed 17 million people per year.
Success of the Onchocerciasis Control Programme exemplifies two points. One
is the power of public health programmes to transform individuals’ lives by
reducing suffering from disease. This is central. But we have too often
neglected a second point: Disease control can be an economic investment with
exceptionally high returns. OCP has invested over half a billion dollars in its
control programmes. World Bank economists have estimated the economic rate of
return to be an impressive 16 to 28 percent. This, too, is central, and an
important lesson learned which inspires WHO and its partners to renew efforts in
the struggle against the major diseases such as HIV/AIDS, malaria and
tuberculosis.
We often feel so small against the immensity of our tasks. Diseases that
affect millions of people in many countries can often seem an impossible
adversary given our limited resources. We can feel that the time we have
available to achieve our goals is too short, and that our focus of attention may
shift too soon to see a task through.
This is what makes OCP such a great success. For 25 years all its partners
have stuck with the goal of eliminating river blindness as a public health
problem. When we started, the goal must have seemed like a distant dream.
I would like to thank those here today that make up some of our many
partners. President Carter, Mr Wolfensohn, Mrs Herfkens, Mr Gilmartin, Dr Hill
and other private sector partners: your contributions have been invaluable in
this success.
I would also like to use this occasion to thank
all the men and women - known and unknown - who fought this historic battle -
for their own and future generations. Among them is the past and present staff
of TDR and the OCP who, through the years, made thousands of large and small
contributions to make the programme such a success story.
One of these people deserves special mention. I
would like to pay special tribute to Dr Ebrahim Samba, who spent 14 years of his
life fighting to drive back river blindness, and who continued to support the
programme after he took over as WHO’s Regional Director for Africa. Dr
Samba’s contribution to OCP has been crucial to its success, and this monument
is also a monument to his commitment and effort.
OCP is a great African success story. It is the mother of all multi-sectoral
cooperation projects. The achievements on river blindness stand as a model for
our current work, such as the Roll Back Malaria and Stop TB Initiative.
Let it also stand as an inspiration to all of us. When it comes to monuments
for eliminated diseases, we still have so many more to unveil.
Thank you. |
