EU Health Union ignoring cardiology

While the EU has already presented rules to establish a European Health Data Space (EHDS) and Europe’s Plan against Cancer within its Medicines Strategy, regulations establishing an EU network for pandemic prepardness were still lacking. Now, the EU propagated three new regulations to be the last cornerstones to complete the EU Health Plan: the Regulation on Serious cross-border health threats (pandemics), the already adopted regulation on the extended mandate of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), and the Emergency Framework Regulation to provide extra powers to the European Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA) which will have a budget of €1.3bn in 2022. “The central pillars of our European Health Union are now in place,” Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides said, explaining that the three regulations add “additional tools to quickly react and respond to emerging health crises, decisively and with unity”.

The new legislation related to cross-border threats empowers the Commission to declare a public health emergency at the EU level. A board of independent advisors is expected to trigger stronger intra-EU cooperation and allow for the rapid development and stockpiling of medical countermeasures. The update to ECDC’s mandate includes the establishment of an EU health task force to assist local responses to the outbreak of diseases a new network of EU reference laboratories, the provision of expertise to EU member states and the European Commission and development of digital platforms for epidemiological surveillance.

Additionally, EU ministers adopted an Emergency Framework Regulation that will empower HERA, which was launched over a year ago, to ensure quicker accessibility to medicines and other medical products. Eurocrats from the EU Commission and EMA will be tasked with drawing up a list of crisis-relevant medical countermeasures based on monitoring of the supply and demand of crisis-relevant medical materials. Like during the pandemic, the Commission will act as a central purchaser of medicines and  vaccines for the member states. A Health Crisis Board is to be established within HERA, to rapidly coordinate at the EU level the supply of and access to medical countermeasures.

However, medical experts are wondering why Europe’s Health Plan does not include action against cardiovascular diseases, the major cause of deaths in Europe albeit novel approaches such predictive genetic and metabolomic screening of patients, in combination with personalised prevention programmes are expected to prevent up to 80% to 90% of cardiovascular deaths. In 2020, about 20% of EU citizens died from cancer,  10% from infections including the COVID-19 pandemic and 33% from cardiovascular diseases. However, EU policy makers appear not to see such a similar high priority for reducing the number of cardiovascular deaths than in fighting cancer.

In contrast, the US govenment by 2015 launched a programme boosting the so-called P4 medicine (prevention, predictive, personalised, participatory) even in several fields of cardiology which is meant to be the next Big Thing in personalised medicine. While the European Medicines Strategy includes a focus is on decreasing cancer mortality by taking benfit of Big Data sciene and the digital transformation in medicine by creating a European Health Data Space (EHDS), its does not in cardiology.

However, first attempts to improve the situation by establishing a screening programme for familiar hypercholesteremia, which leads to heart infarctions in children, have been made within a Bavarian funding programme called DigiMed Bayern. The question raised by the current version of EU Health Plan is, if EU policymakers and their advisors really have an overview what measures can decrease major mortality causes or improve the quality of life for European patients.