Thank you, Mr President; ladies and gentlemen, I shall try to avoid repeating what has already been said, and also to avoid taking a diversion into discussing communicable diseases such as influenza, viruses and so on. Mr Bowis started his speech by saying that ‘he who has health has hope, and he who has hope has everything’. In that case, this morning, I feel very rich, for I have everything. I have hope, and that is everything. I have little more than that. I hope that the centre we are discussing today will very soon become operational. Mrs Grossetête gave a very clear description of what this centre will have to be able to do in order to be effective. In essence, it will have to square the circle. With relatively few people, based a long way away in the north of the European Union, in Sweden, it will have to maintain intensive contact with all the Member States; it will have to motivate their health ministries, spend money and build up information networks, at the same time as maintaining contact with the Commission and with Parliament. Although this involves squaring a circle, I do have hope, and so, like Mr Bowis, I have everything. I cannot do other than agree wholeheartedly with Mrs Grossetête when she says that it is important that we do our work quickly, that it is important that we get things up and running. It follows, though, that the people who work there will have to be highly independent, work in very unconventional ways and possess imagination and the ability to work on their own initiative. By no means everyone can do these things. Looking at a number of other authorities that we have set up over the past few years, I have to say that their success is not exactly self-evident. Now there is the possibility of us coming to a different conclusion. As my fellow-Members have spoken about this Centre in great detail, I have to say what I would have liked to have seen. Hope, in my mind, is associated with aspiration. Of course communicable diseases are important, and of course the fight against them is important in terms of protecting the citizens of this European Union of ours, but let us be clear-sighted about the fact that most people in the European Union do not die of communicable diseases; they die of cancer, of heart attacks, and of strokes. How is it that it is a matter of chance whether you survive a heart attack, depending on whether you live in Berlin or in Madrid, or somewhere else? How is it that best practice in the treatment of cancer cases is not as yet established and communicated in the European Union? I regard that as an intolerable state of affairs. I wish we had been more ambitious and had said that the least we need is to link up best practice within the European Union in order to fight the real diseases that we have to cope with at the moment. Networking would have been within the competence of the European Union, and we could have afforded it. We did not manage it the first time round, but I hope we will, at the second attempt, ensure that people’s recovery from serious illness is not a matter of chance and does not depend on whether they live in the North, the South, the heart of Germany or on its plains, or in some other part of the European Union. Thank you.

Political group: PSE