I wish to extend my gratitude to the prestigious Université Catholique de Louvain for bestowing on me the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa. I feel honoured by your generosity.

Let me also extend to Professor Mund-Dopchie my appreciation for her generous words.

It gives me a very special pleasure to accept this distinction together with Prime Minister Jospin and President Prodi. They are both eminent statesmen of our times, people whom I deeply respect for their vision, commitment and dedication to democracy, social justice and human progress

Rector,

I have had the privilege in life to serve people who have elected me to carry out a programme – a mandate or a mission. As a young Minister of the Environment, as Prime Minister of my country, as chair of the World Commission on Environment and Development or as Director-General of the World Health Organization – in all of these functions my objective has been to take forward a notion which to me encapsulates the very purpose of sustainable development: human opportunity.

Opportunity for each individual to realise his and her full potential, free of discrimination, free of hunger and disease and fully enjoying fundamental human rights.

Opportunity for communities to forge a true sense of belonging and solidarity. Opportunity for the nations of the world to build common security for today’s generations and those to come.

And opportunity for the world to chart a course of sustainable development – a vision in which we aim at leaving future generations with at least the same opportunities that we have enjoyed.

With that notion of opportunity follows the core values of democracy – the critical importance of making participation a meaningful feature of modern society.

In my professional life – as a medical doctor or as elected to public office, I have had the privilege of working with people who have enjoyed those fundamental notions of participation and opportunity.

I have seen myself working as a "we-person" – not an "I-person". It is what people can achieve by working together that makes the difference. That lesson applies to the way we build reliance in the intimacy of the family circle – the way we nurture solidarity and bonds among members of the same community and indeed among nations at the regional and global levels.

I have been fortunate to work with committed people who have risen to the occasion and taken their part of the responsibility. I share today’s honour with all those whom I have had the pleasure of working with over the last decades.

Rector,

Taking up my responsibility as Director-General of the World Health Organization I was in a way reconnecting with my past. You may say that joining WHO was a natural step for someone who spent the first ten years of her professional life in the sector of public health.

But I see that reconnection in a much broader perspective. The notion of health goes well beyond the medical boundaries – it stretches to the very core of human life and progress. The purpose of political work is to enhance human opportunity and mental and physical well being as a prime condition for advancement towards that goal.

Enhancing the health of our population requires the participation and contribution of all sectors of society. A priority for WHO is to anchor health where it truly belongs – at the core of the international development agenda, engaging stakeholders and decision-makers well beyond the medical field to include the whole range of key players who drive the transformation of our societies.

Take food safety. Europe has recently woken up to the stakes of safe food as a major issue and value. The European Commission, thanks to the leadership of President Prodi, has responded swiftly and paved a way for a joint European response to the challenge.

We are discovering food-borne illness as a huge and growing public health problem. Up to 30% of the population in industrialized countries may be affected by food-borne illness each year. In the developing world the situation is far grimmer. In 1990, the morbidity and mortality associated with diarrhoea was estimated to be of the order of 2700 million cases each year, resulting in 2.4 million deaths below the age of five.

WHO is also rising to address this global problem, reaching out to other key partners. The effect of people consuming unsafe food is indeed tolled in human health. But unsafe food becomes unsafe outside the health sector, at the farm, in the factory, in the home. The every end of the food chain can be good health or ill health. The same is true in other areas – take environmental degradation and its health consequences. We in public health must work with many sectors, and certainly with industry, to push for change.

The message of the World Commission on Environment and Development was that we needed a broad cross-sectoral approach to change to safeguard our common future. In WHO we apply that very same logic when we strive for Health for All.

It is indeed relevant to look ahead for global health from the rostrum of a distinguished university. The health revolution of the 20^th century was made possible by scientific advances and increased knowledge. Improved health for large parts of the world population counts as one of the most profound social changes in the history of humanity. One set of figures tells it all: Global average life expectancy is about 66 years today. It was 46 at the end of World War II.

We know that new and daunting advances will continue to challenge our imagination and provide new opportunities. And what is driving all of this is our ability to generate and process knowledge – to search for new knowledge and make the existing knowledge available to all.

The researcher has to strike a difficult balance. She needs to build on evidence. But she also needs to take risks. She needs to go for her vision - to reach one step further than anyone has done before.

In health we have seen it so many times. Decades ago a vaccine against poliomyelitis was just a dream. At one stage many people feared that the spread of polio would take on epidemic proportions. The debate was raging between those who fought for a vaccine against polio – a distant dream - and those who wanted better iron lungs and rocking beds to help alleviate the suffering of the polio victims.

The way the polio situation was addressed some decades ago had similarities to the way we debate the threat of the HIV/AIDS epidemic today.

Then the breakthrough came and the polio vaccine was there. Mass immunization campaigns started, freeing country after country from the burden of this crippling disease. In 1988 the World Health Assembly set the target of global eradication by the end of the year 2000.

That means less than 11 months from today. We have entered the final stretch of the campaign. Together with partners such as UNICEF and Rotary International, WHO is firmly committed to relegating polio to the history books, alongside smallpox, which the World Health Organization helped to eradicate from the face of the earth in 1977.

As we do so, let us not forget how difficult the decision was to keep investing in a dream – a vaccine - that no one could know would become a reality. Let us keep dreams alive. All our knowledge is about the past, but all our challenges are about the future. This is what stimulates scientists and researchers to make the extra effort – and we need to move in the same spirit to develop new medicines and vaccines against mass killers such as malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS.

Rector,

We cannot predict the breakthroughs. But we can prepare our ability to handle them as they come. To an increasing extent the scientific advances will challenge our ability to make innovation available to all and to take ethical and well informed decisions in new areas of science such as genetics and biomedicine.

Our ability to manage new technological developments will require a solid ethical foundation. I believe that the universities of the world – based on the finest traditions of enlightenment and humanism - have a major responsibility in enabling societies to cope with a new set of complex interrelationships: between science and ethics, between commercial interests and the common good, between knowledge and economic and political power, between the need to build on evidence while pursuing a constant quest for new knowledge.

Students should be sensitized to these issues. And may the audience of university reflections go beyond the auditoriums and enrich a broader debate in our societies.

Victor Hugo pointed out that nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come.

The role of health in spurring development and alleviating poverty is one such idea – gaining in strength and increasingly catching the interest of key decision-makers.

Looking at the world, we can afford no illusions: So far the war on poverty has largely failed. Differences are spreading inside countries and between countries. This degrades us and threatens us. It looms as a threat to the environment – not only that of the poor – but of all of us.

Yes – the 20^th century brought about a health revolution. But a thousand million fellow human beings did not reap the benefits of those advances. People who are poor experience neglect of fundamental human rights. Health is key among them.

But health is at the same time part of the solution – a new and potentially powerful exit route out of poverty. The world has committed to halving the number of people living in poverty by 2015. The major development conferences of the 1990s have defined a set of concrete targets to reach that goal, and many of them focus on health – on child and maternal health and access to primary and reproductive health care.

We must now strengthen our focus on how health actions, including those that affect the broad determinants of health, can help reduce poverty and WHO is committed to make this the focus of its corporate strategy in the years to come.

We may be standing at the threshold of a major shift in thinking. Until recently, many development professionals argued that the health sector itself is only a minor player in efforts to improve the overall health of populations. And the overwhelming majority of finance officials and economists have believed that health is relatively unimportant as a development goal or as an instrument for reducing poverty. Health was seen as a consumption rather than an investment cost.

But this is changing. Health may be far more central to poverty reduction than our macroeconomist colleagues have previously thought.

Poverty breeds ill-health – that is nothing new. But we now know much more about how ill-health also breeds poverty, triggers a vicious cycle, hampers economic and social development, and contributes to unsustainable resource depletion and environmental degradation. The persistent problem of malnutrition and the unfolding AIDS crisis in Africa tell this story in its most stark form.

So this is our message to decision makers: Investing in health to reduce poverty could provide the kind of sharp focus we need to mobilize the resources and the attention of the international community.

WHO is working with a growing number of partners to take forward our efforts, be it in our struggle against diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis or HIV/AIDS – be it in our efforts to help countries strengthen their health systems and build their own capacity – be it in driving forward the debt relief process which might free up additional resources for health and education or be it in addressing the key ethical issues of today and tomorrow.

The European Union is one such important partner, and I look forward to visit the European Commission shortly and sign a renewed exchange of letters between the Commission and WHO – highlighting a broad array of cooperation.

Since I am in Belgium, let me express my gratitude for the way this country is such a dedicated supporter of WHO - of our policies of reform and of a large number of our programmes.

And let me include a word of appreciation to the Government of Prime Minister Jospin which has also been in the forefront of supporting WHO as we strive to face new challenges and opportunities.Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come.

Victor Hugo has been proven right many times, and we will make it happen once more. Investing wisely in health is an idea whose time has come – in industrialized countries – but above all in the poor countries of the world.

Rector,

Another thought by Victor Hugo provides a fitting frame for this solemn ceremony. In Les Misérables he wrote: "..rien n’est tel que le rêve pour engendrer l’avenir." Through research and scholarly reflection, universities like this one have been a major source of creativity to generate our dreams for a better future. Through analysis and advocacy, institutions like WHO have been a major source of energy to transform those dreams into action.