Adoption of Community action programmes on cancer, AIDS and health promotion
The European Parliament and the Council of Ministers have adopted three Community action programmes in the field of public health: - Five-year action programme on cancer; - Five-year action programme on AIDS and certain other communicable diseases; - Five-year action programme on health promotion, information, education and training. The programmes were adopted with the budgetary amounts foreseen in the Commission's proposals (Cancer: ECU 64 million; AIDS: ECU 49.6 million; and Health Promotion: ECU 35 million). Mr. Padraig Flynn, Commissioner responsible for social affairs, greeted the adoption of the three programmes as "an important step forward in the development of public health policy in the European Union. Each programme contains actions which will lend support to Member States in helping them prevent diseases and encourage healthy life-styles". Mr. Flynn added that he expected rapid progress to be made, under the Italian Presidency, towards adopting two further public health programmes in the areas of drug dependence and health monitoring. In this context, the Commission has also recently reinforced its efforts to prevent smoking by signing a contract with a British organization, Health Promotion Wales, to strengthen its information and research activities in this field. The new contract provides for collection of data, both nationally and at Community level, on: tobacco consumption; aspects of public health linked to smoking; and the economic, statistical, legal and political aspects of the production, processing, sale and consumption of tobacco. Specific areas of interest will include passive smoking, indirect taxation and consumption and direct and indirect advertising.