Your Excellency Dr Harsh Vardhan, Honourable Minister of Health and Family Welfare of India and Chair of the Regional Committee,
Excellency Ms Dechen Wangmo, Minister for Health of the Royal Government of Bhutan and Vice-Chair of the Regional Committee,
Honourable Ministers and Heads of Delegation,
My sister, Regional Director Dr Poonam Khetrapal Singh,
Dear colleagues and friends,
First of all I would like to say Namaste!
It’s a great honour to be talking with you, and I’m sorry that I can’t be with you in person.
I offer my congratulations to all of the new ministers, including the Honourable Minister of Health and Family Welfare of India.
As you know, I had planned to speak to you yesterday, but I was with the Secretary-General in DRC and was not able to connect.
Thank you very much for your flexibility and for accommodating me in your programme today.
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I would like to once again congratulate you, my sister Poonam, on your reelection for another term as Regional Director. I should have actually been with you when you started your second term, so I’m sorry for that.
I echo the call she made yesterday to sustain the gains you have made, accelerate progress and innovate.
You have many achievements to celebrate, especially in relation to the eight regional flagships, which Dr Schwartlander summarized in his remarks yesterday.
He listed many of the diseases that have been eliminated in your countries in recent years.
But gains can easily be lost. Just last week, four European countries lost their measles-free status.
None of us can afford to be complacent.
I’m impressed with the progress you have made on measles and rubella in the region.
Five countries have already eliminated measles – Bhutan, DPR Korea, Maldives, Sri Lanka and Timor Leste.
And six have controlled rubella – Bangladesh, Bhutan, DPR Korea, Maldives, Sri Lanka and Timor Leste.
Vaccination rates have increased significantly across the region, leading to a 75 percent reduction in mortality due to measles since 2000.
By the end of this year, an estimated 400 million children will have been protected against measles and rubella by a vaccine.
This is a stunning achievement. Congratulations.
Your success, rightly, is prompting you to raise the bar.
Instead of eliminating measles and controlling rubella by 2020, this week you will consider a new goal to eliminate both diseases by 2023.
This is a bold commitment that will require you to address challenges including immunity gaps, sub-optimal surveillance and inadequate financing.
But I am a firm believer in setting ambitious targets that force us to stretch almost to breaking point.
Rest assured that you have the Secretariat’s full support in working towards a South-East Asia region that is free of measles and rubella. We will be with you the whole way.
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I’m also pleased to see your commitment to accelerating the elimination of cervical cancer as a public health problem.
Like measles and rubella, cervical cancer is an entirely preventable disease.
There is no reason any woman should die from it.
And yet they do. Last year, almost 100,000 women lost their lives to cervical cancer in this region.
That’s why WHO has launched a global initiative to eliminate cervical cancer.
I congratulate Bhutan, Maldives, Sri Lanka and Thailand for introducing the HPV vaccine nationally.
I’m glad to hear that Bhutan spoke yesterday about its commitment to eliminating cervical cancer.
We understand that vaccine shortages and prices are a barrier for many other countries.
WHO is committed to working with you, and the vaccine manufacturers, to ensure that all women have access to this life-saving tool.
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Excellencies, colleagues and friends,
This region is prone to emergencies of all kinds.
Just in the past year you have witnessed the destruction of Cyclone Fani in India and Bangladesh, earthquakes and tsunamis in Indonesia, floods and landslides in Myanmar, an outbreak of Nipah virus in India, and the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Cox’s Bazaar.
I congratulate you for the way the region has responded to each of these emergencies. Your efforts have saved lives and prevented suffering.
You have also made good progress on emergency preparedness.
Eight of the 11 Member States have completed joint external evaluations, and your core capacities under the International Health Regulations have improved significantly over the past decade.
I also congratulate Thailand on becoming the first country in the region with a WHO-classified emergency medical team.
The flagship priority on emergency risk management implemented by the Regional Director is bearing fruit.
Cyclone Fani is a perfect example. Although 64 people tragically lost their lives, without the early warning and evacuation system, many more people could have died, and the costs could have been much higher.
This underlines a key point: countries that invest in emergency preparedness will save lives, and save money.
The current Ebola outbreak in DRC is a case in point.
Preparations in neighbouring provinces and countries have helped to prevent Ebola from spreading.
Although there have been imported cases in Uganda and in the city of Goma, preventive measures have stopped the virus from getting a foothold.
The Delhi Declaration on Emergency Preparedness, which you adopted this morning, is a vital step towards making the region safer for all its people.
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Although it is not classified as an emergency, the enormous burden of tuberculosis in the South-East Asia region demands the same urgent response as an outbreak or natural disaster.
As you know, half of all deaths from tuberculosis globally are in this region, even though it is home to just one quarter of the world’s people.
Following the High-Level Meeting on TB at the UN General Assembly last year, I wrote to Heads of State and Heads of Government of 48 countries with the highest TB burden, including from this region, urging them to accelerate country action to meet the End TB targets.
To meet those targets, this region needs to reach and treat at least 10 million people with latent TB infection by 2022.
This will require an urgent and rapid scaling up of access to preventive treatment, which is lower in this region than any other.
The Regional Action Plan on latent TB infection estimates the investments needed to find and treat those all those who need it. They are not insignificant.
But they are investments that would yield a rich reward. More than 1.3 million cases of TB would be averted, and more than 84,000 lives would be saved.
The long-term gains in terms of treatment costs avoided and increased productivity would be huge.
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Excellencies, colleagues and friends,
Emergency preparedness. Measles and rubella. Cervical cancer. Tuberculosis. Each of the issues I have discussed presents unique challenges that demand a unique response.
But the common denominator for addressing each of them is strong primary health care, as you would agree, and a commitment to universal health coverage.
You heard from India yesterday about the impressive progress it is making as part of its Ayushman Bharat scheme.
But as Dr Singh said, you still have a long way to go as a region.
On current trends, fewer than half of your countries will achieve more than 80 percent coverage of essential health services by 2030.
Far too many people lack access to essential health services, and far too many experience catastrophic health spending or are pushed into extreme poverty by out-of-pocket health spending.
As I always say, health is a political choice.
The road to universal health coverage can be a long one. But the starting point is always strong political commitment. We urge you to do everything you can to bring your head of state or head of government to the High-Level Meeting on Universal Health Coverage at the United Nations General Assembly later this month. I hope to see all of you there.
We also call on all countries to mobilize more domestic resources for health, to expand services, improve the quality of those services and increase financial protection.
One of the key ways to do that is by raising taxes on tobacco products, alcohol, sugary drinks and other products that harm health.
This is a win-win because it helps to generate revenue that can be invested in health, and it helps to prevent noncommunicable diseases by reducing the consumption of products that cause them.
This is especially important for tobacco, which remains the biggest cause of preventable morbidity and mortality in the region, despite signs of declining tobacco use.
However, all of your countries show rising alcohol consumption, rising levels of obesity, and a projected rise in people with hypertension.
Without urgent and decisive action, these trends are a health crisis in the making.
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Excellencies, colleagues and friends,
WHO is committed to supporting you to address each of the challenges you are facing.
And we are committed to becoming the organization you need us to be.
Since we last met 12 months ago, the Regional Directors and I have been hard at work transforming WHO into an agile organization that works seamlessly across all 3 levels to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals.
We now have a new programme budget to support the General Programme of Work, which you approved at the World Health Assembly this year.
To build this new budget, we turned our planning process upside down, so that country needs explicitly drive the work of headquarters and the regions. We have to support you, based on your priorities.
For example, for the first time in our history, all three levels of the organization have worked together to define exactly what headquarters will produce in the coming biennium. As a result, we now have a list of nearly 300 specific “global public health goods” – the technical tools you need to make progress towards the “triple billion” targets.
But we’re not just changing what we do, we’re also changing how we do it.
Our new operating model aligns the organization at all three levels and will enable us to work together more effectively and efficiently.
One of our key priorities was to make sure every single WHO employee can connect their work to the corporate priorities.
Today, 75% of staff can link their day-to-day work to the General Programme of Work, compared with only 47% at the start of this year.
We are also committed to increasing diversity across the organization. We’ve already achieved several quick wins, by moving with affirmative action.
We have started rolling out 13 new or redesigned processes to harmonize and optimize the way we do business, from the way we develop norms and standards, to recruitment, procurement, communications and more.
And we have announced plans for the WHO Academy, a major initiative to revolutionize health learning globally and train health workers to implement WHO norms and standards.
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Excellencies, colleagues and friends,
Thank you for your commitment and support.
I leave you with three requests.
First, I urge you to mobilize domestic resources to invest in primary health care, which must be the top priority for every country.
This is not only the foundation for achieving universal health coverage, it’s also the foundation for making progress on all the other issues I have discussed: measles and rubella; cervical cancer; emergency preparedness; tuberculosis and more.
As I said, raising taxes on tobacco products, alcohol, sugary drinks and other health-harming products is a win-win for health that we encourage all countries to pursue.
Second, I urge you to invest in emergency preparedness.
The Joint External Evaluations have shown where the gaps are. Now all countries must act decisively to close those gaps.
Third, the high-level meeting on universal health coverage in New York next month is a vital opportunity to catalyze political commitment.
We need as many Heads of State or Government present as possible. I urge you to do everything you can to make sure your leaders are there in New York to show their commitment to universal health coverage, and I look forward to seeing you too.
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Thank you once again for your commitment and support. I assure you of mine.
I wish you a very productive meeting as we work together to promote health, keep the world safe and serve the vulnerable.
Thank you so much. Namaste.