Ghulam Nabi Azad to attend third BRICS health ministers meeting in South Africa

Union Health and Family Welfare Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad will attend the third BRICS health ministers meeting from November 6 at Cape Town, South Africa.

The health ministers from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa will attend the two-day meeting. The health ministers meeting will be preceded by the BRICS senior officials meeting.

The BRICS meeting will deliberate the issues of governance reform including risk and accountability, finance and human resources; programmatic and finance reform including support to member states; and a progress report on the Delhi action plans.

The discussions will be on the key thematic areas focussing on strengthening health surveillance systems ; reducing NCD risk factors through prevention and health promotion; universal health coverage ;strategic health technologies, with a focus on communicable and non-communicable diseases ; medical technologies ; and drug discovery and development.

These thematic areas of work were identified in respect of each country on the sidelines of World Health Assembly (WHA) held at Geneva in May 2012 and were to be carried forward by the technical group.

The first BRICS health ministers meeting was held at Beijing, China in July, 2011 where the Beijing Declaration was adopted.

It emphasized the importance and the need of technology transfer as a means to empower developing countries; the important role of generic medicines in the realization of the right to health and to establish priorities in research and development as well as cooperation among BRICS countries including support to transfer of technologies and innovation in a sustainable way to foster cooperation among BRICS countries to make available and improve technology.

The 2nd BRICS health ministers meetings was held in New Delhi in January 2013, joint action plans were agreed upon for the thematic areas and a joint Delhi Communique was released.