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		Multiple Sclerosis Speech in Plenary - December 18th 2003 Mr. President May I first of all welcome my constituent Louise McVay from Loughborough in the East Midlands, who is in the gallery. She has been a tireless campaigner for MS sufferers, and I commend her for her courage and hard work. I would also like to thank Uma Aaltonen for her excellent work on this report. MS is the most common form of disability affecting young adults in the EU, and two thirds of sufferers are women. There are 400,000 sufferers in the EU, including 85,000 in my own country, the UK. MS demands our attention. This report proposes the very best kind of European co-operation. It recognises that the EU has no competence to determine the health policies of member states -- still less to set budgets or spending priorities for member-states' health services. That is as it should be. What the EU can and should do is to offer exchange of best practice, to bench-mark performance, and to encourage uniformly high standards of care. It has another vital role, and that is the area of medical research. As spokesman for my Conservative delegation on research, I was very pleased to see chronic diseases prioritised in the EU's Sixth Framework Programme. While it is fashionable to concentrate on newly-emerging diseases, we cannot afford to lose sight of familiar problems which affect huge numbers of patients. We still do not have a full understanding of the causes of MS, and we should not rest until this problem is solved. Certainly we have much to do in my own country, the UK. Our Labour government has failed to address the problem of the "post-code lottery", which means that levels of care, and availability of drugs, can vary from street to street. I was first alerted to this problem for MS sufferers in the UK during the 2001 General Election Campaign, when one of our Conservative candidates was approached by a young lady in Nottingham, Mrs. Peel, who'd just been diagnosed with the disease. Mrs Peel, who was pregnant at the time, was alarmed to find that she was being denied therapies and treatment by the local Health Authority simply because of where she lived. I was delighted that the Conservatives' spokesman on health at the time, Dr Liam Fox, visited Mrs Peel personally to listen to her case. I would also like to commend the European MS platform for their campaigning work. I was glad to support their European MS Awareness Day in the European Parliament in Brussels in June last year. Such events are invaluable in briefing Members on the issues surrounding the disease and the problems faced by sufferers. As we come to the end of the European Year of People with Disabilities, we must focus on the needs of MS patients, and the research-based opportunities to accelerate the development of even more effective treatments.