At the informal meeting of health ministers held in Valetta, 20. March 2017. Hungary was represented by Orsolya Pacsay-Tomassich Deputy State Secretary.
As the main health priority in the Maltese Presidency program is combatting childhood obesity, the ministers held an extensive debate on how the worrying trends can be reversed. The participants agreed that multisectorial approach is indispensable as tools in the hands of health ministers are rather limited. As the Presidency rightly pointed out, schools are not just places to learn about mathematics, history, science and languages but also places where children should be given the opportunity to thrive by developing good eating and lifestyle habits that can last a lifetime.
In this spirit, Orsolya Pacsay-Tomassich draw attention to several measures of the Hungarian Government, such as everyday physical education and encouraged other ministers to consider more ambitious steps in the field of school food standardization and introduce binding regulatory measures instead of voluntarily applicable guidelines. In addition, the deputy state secretary attached a great deal of importance to taxation measures that are efficient tools to reduce unhealthy foodstuffs offered to children, to encourage reformulation and to promote healthy nutrition.
The delegations discussed what measures should be taken in order to fast track actions on HIV towards ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030 in the European Union. Hungary is fully committed to contribute to the global targets set by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) to end AIDS by 2030. In this regard we share the common objectives of achieving the ‘90–90–90’ targets for 2020 (90% of all people living with HIV will know their status; 90% of people aware of their status will receive sustained antiretroviral treatment; and 90% of those on antiretroviral treatment will have viral suppression).
Ministers also exchanged their opinions on the opportunities in structured voluntary cooperation in the field of improving access to innovative technologies for Rare Diseases. Orsolya Pacsay-Tomassich expressed Hungary’s full support relating to the recently launched European Reference Networks which might be good settings of accelerated research and development of orphan medicines. In order to increase negotiating power in relation to monopolistic pharmaceutical industry players regional cooperation play an important role, so every exchange of information between specific groups of member states is always welcome.
Structured mobility of medical specialists for the purpose of enhancing access to specialized services was also on the agenda. The deputy state secretary made it clear that Hungary – together with other countries of the Central and Eastern European Region – have experienced a massive loss of health workforce in the past years and therefore mobility (including health workforce recruitment) should be handled in an ethical way, resulting in better distribution of health professionals.
