Strasbourg, 09/09/2005 (Agence Europe) - By adopting the report by the British Conservative member John Bowis, on diseases in developing countries, in Strasbourg on Thursday (76 votes in favour, eight against and two abstentions), the European Parliament has called upon the Commission to transpose the political proposals of the new action plan to fight HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria into concrete actions, guaranteeing appropriate programming decisions and sufficient budgetary envelopes. The Parliament stresses that it is essential to obtain a greater contribution of funds from the Member States, in order to pay for external actions and development aid from the European Union, as there is a risk that the resources deficit for HIV/AIDS, malaria and TB may reach a level of 11,500 million EUR by 2007.
The Parliament urges the developing countries to reform their public services and basic health care systems, and calls on the EU to support this process via emergency aid and stepping up human and institutional capacities and infrastructures. It requests that the guideline document on the human resources provided for by the Commission's action programme also incorporate proposals for urgent actions to counter the brain drain of healthcare professionals from developing countries, by such means as improved training, career and salary possibilities, incentives to stay, safe working conditions, cooperation with specific initiatives targeting diseases, twinning agreements, support for volunteers, and the dissemination of best practice and technical support.
The Parliament stresses the urgent need for medicines to be accessible and for the pharmaceutical industry to make its products available and affordable in countries with low incomes. It states that it is seriously concerned at information that certain African governments are taxing the sales or imports of anti-retroviral medicines and others, which makes them unaffordable to the poorest populations. The Parliament therefore calls on the Commission to investigate this practice and to encourage governments to abolish these taxes. It also urges countries affected by malaria to speed up the introduction of artemisinin-based drug combinations (ACT), a treatment which is recognised to be the most efficient; calls on the donors to fund ACT and support the purchase, prequalification and production of artemisinin-based drugs. The Parliament calls upon the industry to produce insecticide-treated mosquito nets (ITNs), particularly long-lasting treated mosquito nets and calls for the implementation of programmes aiming to speed up the delivery of ITNs, to provide training on the symptoms of malaria, to eliminate stagnant water sources, to provide primary health care services including drugs and rapid and reliable diagnosis tests, and to build up partnerships carried out by the countries, with a particular view to removing bottlenecks. The Parliament takes note of work carried out under the DNDi and TDR initiatives into a treatment for AHT (African human trypanosomiasis or sleeping sickness), and stresses the urgent need to assess the safety and efficiency of nifurtimox and to create new, efficient diagnosis tests which are easy to use. It calls for increased efforts in the prevention of Chagas disease (a parasitic disease which is particularly prevalent in Latin America), by involving the affected populations in tests on transmission, by separating living spaces for animals with those of people, and by using insecticides to fight carriers of the disease. The Parliament also favourably welcomes the world programme of the WHO to identify regions in which lymphatic filariasis is endemic, and treat the populations at risk with an annual, single-dose treatment, for at least five years.
The Parliament calls for the activities of the EDCTP (European-Developing Countries Clinical Trials Programme, which is managed in partnership by the EU and the African countries) to be extended to encompass other neglected diseases and other phases of clinical development (Phases I and IV). Lastly, it calls on the Commission and the Member States actively to support the implementation of the Doha Declaration (on the provision of medicines) and to oppose any challenges by any member states of the WTO to commitments taken unanimously in the statement on intellectual property and public health, particularly during negotiations of the "ADPIC plus" clauses in the framework of regional free-trade agreements.