Libreville Declaration to Administer a Healthy Africa


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A union of health and environment ministers in Africa have taken on new schemes to strengthen environmental sanity that threatens the health of Africans.

The Initiative comes as a World Health Organisation (WHO) commission’s report indicated that poor environmental management and lack of considerate policies from African Health and Environmental ministers is killing people on a ‘grand scale.’

The African ministers, who met in Libreville, Gabon, signed and accepted what is now called a ‘Libreville Declaration.’

Minister of Health and Public Hygiene of Gabon, Mme Angelique Ngoma, commented that the meeting will go down in the sands of Africa’s history as the first to generate a synergy of political action and complementarities between health and environment for sustainable African development.

Regional Director of World Health Organisation, Africa Regional Office, Dr. Luis G. Sambo, in a report on the declaration said: ‘The signing of this landmark declaration is the first step towards saving the lives of millions of people from the harmful effects of changes in the environment. We will work together to promote strategic alliances between health and environment. I am delighted that we have managed to secure political commitment to catalyse institutional changes needed to improve the health and well-being of communities in the region.’

Health file  The lack of education and political will, poverty, out-moded traditional beliefs, to mention but a few, have been widely blamed for causing severe and sometimes unwarranted health catastrophies of genocidal proportions on the African continent. Child killer diseases, malaria, tuberculosis, water borne diseases, HIV/AIDS, among other preventable ailments have killed millions in their wake. As rightly said by the former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, on May 13, 2000 "More people (...) died of Aids in the past year (1999-2000, ndlr) in Africa than in all the wars on the continent".
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