The European Union conference on chronic respiratory disease: purpose and conclusions

The European Respiratory Roadmap

“…For these reasons, the ERS participated last year in the "Year of the Lung" proclaimed by all international respiratory societies and organized several events at the European Parliament in this context, to raise awareness of respiratory diseases. One of them was the first high level conference on Chronic Respiratory Disease, under the Belgian Presidency, which was held in Brussels in October last year [7]. These efforts have been successful as awareness of respiratory disease with health policy makers is now rising.…”

Moving forward with Therapeutic Advances in Respiratory Disease

“…It is estimated that over 1 billion people of all ages suffer from chronic respiratory diseases, and that 4 million people died prematurely from those conditions in 2005 [Bousquet et al 2010]. In this context, institutions such as the European Respiratory Society have developed a roadmap of respiratory disease, with the aim to provide guidance to health policy makers on what action needs to be taken to deal with the problem of chronic respiratory diseases in the next two [Decramer et al 2011]. One of the main aspects is to stimulate biomedical research, and indeed respiratory medicine is a very active field with an increase in the number of publications of 33% between 1995 and 2003 [Michalopoulos and Falagas, 2005].…”

Chronic respiratory diseases and lung cancer research: a perspective from the European Union

“…The conclusions of the conference on "Chronic respiratory disease-exploring solutions in the EU" (October 2010, Belgian presidency) [35] and further discussions by the Ministers of Health of all 28 European Union member states resulted in the Council conclusions on chronic diseases [36], inviting the European Commission to integrate chronic diseases as a priority in current and future European research and innovation programmes. The Council conclusions on "Prevention, early diagnosis and treatment of chronic respiratory diseases in children" [37,38] invite the member states to develop research for better understanding of increase in prevalence of CRD in children, and to tackle the disparities between regions and throughout Europe, among other actions.…”