Response to 'The European health strategy--so what next?'

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The European Union's (EU's) Health Strategy for 2008–131 can perhaps be said to mark the ‘coming of age’ of public health within the Commission (EC); formal EC public health policy has indeed come a long way since the publication of the first EC Framework Programme in public health2 in late 1993. In those days there was no concept whatsoever of any kind of all-embracing strategy for public health; there were merely some rather uncoordinated disease-prevention programmes, many of which had developed on the basis of inter-governmental collaboration on a few issues, at that time outwith any treaty, before Maastricht Treaty implementation3 in late 1993 gave to the EU institutions their first public health responsibilities. Since that first Framework Programme, other so-called ‘strategies’ have followed,4 but over the last 10 years, they have become indeed more strategic, and have attempted increasingly to relate policy to at least a degree of analysis of Europe's public health needs. The new strategy can thus be seen to represent a culmination of this process. The world is full of ‘might have beens’, and we should not forget that …