Prof. Herman Goossens: Shout About the European Union’s Success

Today, the Nature International Weekly Journal of Science published a World View from Herman Goossens – professor of medical microbiology at the University of Antwerp and University Hospital Antwerp, Belgium – on how important it is that scientists speak up about what the EU does for them and the European citizens.

‘When the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, I received a text message from a friend and colleague at the University of Oxford: “From one proud European to another; I feel sadness in every cell in my whole body on this nightmare day. I am shocked and devastated. But I hope science and friendships will find a way to transcend this awful mess.”

The nightmare continues. The UK parliament last week voted to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty to begin withdrawal, and the EU faces probably its greatest crisis.

The European Union is a great project. Yet millions of Europeans are questioning what it does for them. They are told it spends its money on fanciful projects that don’t benefit its citizens. They have lost faith in its ability to address their most pressing problems.

Has the EU let its citizens down? I can respond by referring to the fight against antibiotic resistance. The answer is an emphatic ‘No’. We have made significant progress over the past two decades, and our success shows what is possible. With colleagues, I analysed levels of funding from the EU and individual states devoted to antibiotic resistance between 2007 and 2013. Some 33% of the total investment came from the EU.

By contrast, funds from the EU Framework Programme made up only 7.5% of all research expenditure financed by governments of EU members. This suggests significant underfunding of such research by member states. But more crucially, it shows how important cross-national efforts are. A campaign in Belgium over antibiotic misuse began in 2000, with a similar effort starting in France two years later. Ministers in those countries would not have offered essential support without an EU-funded project that collected necessary and highly compelling data on the scale of the problem’.

Read the whole article here.