Mr President, we have an excellent opportunity today to debate and understand certain basic public health issues and advance them at European Union level. As I had the honour of acting as rapporteur on public health for the European Union, may I say that it is extremely important that one of the three lines of approach of this programme over the next five years is to develop a rapid response to health hazards. I have two or three comments and then I will come back to what the Commissioner said about a centre, which is essential now, if we are to be able to deal efficiently with health hazards. As I am sure you all well know, the mobility which exists today, with millions of people travelling to all corners of the planet, has boosted infectious diseases enormously. We have seen as much in the case of severe acute respiratory syndrome. It started in a province of China and there are now cases even in Europe. The second important point is that there are sudden epidemics of new diseases. Over the last twenty years, there have been reports of thirty new infectious diseases, or variations on old diseases caused by mutating viruses, or even the re-emergence of old diseases such as tuberculosis, to give but one example. Consequently, all this calls for constant vigilance, constant monitoring and a response, an organised, coordinated response. Then there is the known resistance to antibiotics which bacteria are developing. Nowadays, you go into hospital to be treated for some illness or other and suddenly the whole hospital is contaminated, sometimes very, very seriously. So these sorts of bacteria, which we cannot treat with antibiotics, are also a hazard and we need research to deal with them. Finally, one last point: biological terrorism. Biological terrorism, where terrorists use bacteria spores or viruses or some other means, is also a threat that calls for a coordinated and proper response. To come back to what the Commissioner said earlier, what I have just said bears out the need he mentioned for a centre at European Union level which will have the facilities, a network of laboratories, to study and monitor and coordinate these responses, so that we can investigate diseases quickly and quickly establish both their causes and how to treat them. Consequently, we need to have the courage to promote this centre. A symposium on this centre was held at the European Parliament in November under the aegis of the Group of the , attended by thirty of the most eminent epidemiologists. Allow me to read you the conclusion in English, which dates from November, in other words before SARS. It says: 'Today's debate demonstrates that Europe needs to move far beyond the current Community network on communicable diseases and their control to face the new challenges posed by diseases that do not have national frontiers, aggravated by non-deliberate health threats. Now there is a clear need to move to the next stage, the creation of a competent centre to serve the European citizen, because Europe lacks a fully effective and coordinated surveillance and response capacity for the surveillance of infectious diseases, including those which are vaccine-preventable, as well as the capacity to identify and tackle disease outbreaks.’ It seems to me that we should insist at the Constitutional Convention that public health be given its rightful place, alongside the environment. Personally, I am not at all pleased at the place public health has been given in the European Constitution, and I hope that my honourable friends in the Constitutional Convention will listen and take account of what is happening with SARS and produce a constitution which puts public health protection alongside environmental protection.

Political group: PPE-DE