Remarks as Delivered at the Italian Embassy

Good morning. Thank you, Dr. Daniore, for that warm introduction. And thank you, Ambassador Castellaneta, for inviting me to speak to all of you.

We are here this morning because we share the common goal of helping people get three things we all want: improved prosperity, well-being, and health.

When I was growing up in New York, my mother used to tell me, "If you don't have your health, you don't have anything." And she said it in just that tone of voice, too.

I had my own health status checked recently as I visited my doctor. He told me that I'm in pretty good health for a man of 60. Unfortunately, I'm only 40 years old.

Gatherings like this symposium offer opportunities for different peoples to come together to work toward solutions to shared problems. We are all here to share ideas, to build trust, and ultimately, to improve the health of all our peoples.

In this Administration, we have made promoting good health around the world a priority, we call this health diplomacy. Under President Bush's direction, we have committed to finding ways to working with people across the world to help them overcome whatever health challenges they face. Secretary Leavitt has made health diplomacy one of his top priorities and at HHS, as he recently described in a blog he kept up while traveling around Africa for several weeks. Through many parts of our Department, we are using health diplomacy as a means to partner with foreign governments and organizations to save lives and heal communities.

Our approach to health diplomacy is based on using two of our great assets: our financial wealth and our expertise. We have a strong economy with a robust tax base. We also have top-flight medical schools and health care experts. We want to share these blessings with people around the world who could most benefit from them.

Obviously, the number one thing on many of our minds is AIDS. With the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the largest international health initiative in history dedicated to a single disease, we are investing a tremendous amount as well as providing expert guidance and scientific support.

When President Bush proposed the plan almost five years ago, only 50,000 people in all of sub-Saharan Africa were receiving treatment for HIV or AIDS.

Since we launched the plan, we have committed over $15 billion to scale up the HIV and AIDS prevention, treatment, and care in the developing world. We have been working in partnership with foreign governments, free-market institutions, and community organizations to make a real difference in the lives of people afflicted with HIV and AIDS. The plan is organized around three principles: one national plan, one national coordinating authority, and one national monitoring and evaluation system, and with these principles, we're working with the United Nations and the United Kingdom and other European nations in a manner that facilitates a whole range of different efforts.

Our experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, highly trained physicians, epidemiologists, public health advisors, virologists, and laboratory scientists are providing technical assistance. Our scientists at the National Institutes of Health are working on an international research and training portfolio. Our specialists at our Health Resources and Services Administration are providing advice to hospitals around the world, training, and nursing training.

And our experts at the Food and Drug Administration are working to ensure that AIDS patients in developing nations have access to affordable medicines. In 2004, we revised our review process to expedite the approval of generic anti-retroviral drugs. These drugs undergo the same scientific review that makes them eligible for use in the United States, but with an expedited process. A little over a month ago we reached a major milestone with the approval of the 50th and 51st drugs through the process.

The expedited process makes sure our programs around the world have access to the affordably-priced AIDS medicines. These 50 drugs are produced by companies in Asia, Africa, and America, and include a commonly used, three-in-one combination pill at one of the lowest prices in the world. Because these medications cost less, but are equally effective, we can afford to treat many people.

Thanks to the resources and collaborations of President Bush's plan, we're now supporting treatment for 1.1 million people in 15 focus countries around the world.

Malaria is another scourge that still afflicts many developing countries. A child dies somewhere in Africa from malaria every 30 seconds, for example. That doesn't have to happen, malaria is both preventable and treatable. While it has disappeared from many other parts of the world, Africa has seen its resurgence in recent years.

In 2005, President Bush announced a new Malaria Initiative. This initiative is a five-year program to stamp out malaria in 15 of the hardest-hit African countries. So far, American taxpayers have committed $1.2 billion to this fight. Our scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health are helping with everything from developing plans specific to each country to evaluating the performance of the health care workers on the ground.

Just like the Emergency Plan, President Bush's Malaria Initiative works with local agencies and aid workers to provide millions of people with insecticide-treated mosquito nets, indoor spraying, and anti-malaria medicine. By the end of next year, in fact, 70 percent of families who are living in focus countries will be protected by insecticide-treated nets.

Because pandemic influenza is one of the most threatening emerging infectious diseases, President Bush has made our flu preparations a top priority. As such, we have been working with foreign governments to prepare against this threat.

In 2006, we invested $125 million to fill critical gaps in global disease surveillance and laboratory diagnostic networks. This is in addition to $180 million we have invested to help high-risk countries strengthen their capacity to recognize, diagnose, and report influenza outbreaks caused by both the H5N1 virus and seasonal influenza. And this past spring, we awarded $161 million to help expand international surveillance programs and bolster domestic influenza clinical research.

A pandemic would severely hurt most parts of the world, all at once. It's a disease that knows no borders. Here I would be remiss if I didn't mention our Commissioned Corps. They're a branch of the U.S. military that we refer to as our unarmed service. The Commissioned Corps is part of our Public Health Service, and consists of officers who are experts in public health. We deploy them to help with public health issues wherever they are needed, domestically as well as internationally. We've recently been deploying them around Asia to monitor the development of different strains of avian influenza.

I hope that governments around the world will all commit to sharing data and virus samples and to working with one another openly transparently. Since the threat of a pandemic is so universal, if we are to overcome such a health threat, we will need to cooperate with one another as much as possible.

Food safety is another presidential priority that's an area of universal interest. Regardless of language or nationality, when any parents gather their families for dinner, they want the food they put on the table to be safe.

We trust that the farmers who grew our vegetables, the fishermen who caught our fish, and the manufacturers who processed our food products are committed to selling us food that is safe.

President Bush has appointed Secretary Leavitt as head of a food safety group, where he is working to ensure that our food industry has all the right practices in place to nip problems in the food supply in the bud.

Recently, I traveled around the United States with Secretary Leavitt to observe firsthand every step in how food safety practices are conducted in America. We saw food being imported at the Port of LA. We visited a meat processing plant. We watched food coming over our border in Nogales, Arizona. And we were shown the inner workings of a supermarket.

All countries want to ensure that the food they import is safe. And we want to ensure that the food they export is safe. So to help countries that lack robust food safety regulatory organizations like our Food and Drug Administration, we have been advising foreign governments on how they can best improve their country's food safety practices.

And in light of the food-borne disease outbreaks and illnesses of the last year, we are committed to determining how we can best work with farmers, producers, and manufacturers around the world to keep food safe for all of us.

These are just snapshots of some of the collaborations we have around the world. As Edmund Burke said, "No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little." Over the course of the symposium, I hope we can all find additional ways and innovative solutions, however great or small, to improve the health of all our peoples, and everyone around the world. Thank you.