Public Remarks
The St. Petersburg Forum as a New Russian-American Partnership
William J. Burns, U.S. Ambassador to Russia
St. Petersburg First Annual Forum on Global Health, May 21, 2007
I am delighted to meet with you this evening. I want to thank the St. Petersburg State University School of Public Health and the Center for Strategic and International Studies for organizing this forum. Thank you for graciously hosting this event. Thank you, Senator Frist, for introducing me. It is an honor to share the podium with you.
Russia is no stranger to great scientific breakthroughs. Within the walls of this University, some of the greatest scientific and medical minds of the last two centuries studied and taught. Chemistry professor Dimitriy Mendeleyev developed the periodic table of elements, whose symbols we all had to memorize in high school chemistry classes. While studying here in the 1890s, Dimitriy Ivanovskiy discovered the world's first known virus, the tobacco mosaic virus. He opened up a whole new field of medical science: virology. Nobel Prize Winner Ivan Pavlov's famous experiments on the reflex reactions of dogs laid the foundations for modern behavioral psychology.
But tonight, for a minute, I want to take you back 50 years to the height of the Cold War, when two doctors half a world apart decided to do something about polio, one of the most dreaded diseases of the 20th century. Mass polio epidemics had swept around the world up through the 1950s and left thousands of people paralyzed, including Franklin Roosevelt, who contracted the disease in 1921. Dr. Albert Sabin from the University of Cincinnati, and Dr. Mikhail Chumakov, from Moscow's Institute for Polio Research, worked together to develop the Sabin polio vaccine. In Cincinnati, Sabin developed a vaccine made from a weakened and attenuated live form of the polio virus. In Moscow, Chumakov led the team of Russian scientists that refined the vaccine and developed it into a useful form that could be taken orally. As a result, over 70 million people in the Soviet Union and the United States were inoculated against this deadly disease. This effort would not have been possible without the active involvement of both of our governments.
Our strategic partnerships in health are no less important today than they were 50 years ago. We need to build on the compelling example of Dr. Sabin and Dr. Chumakov, who recognized half a century ago that the need to counter the public health threat of polio outweighed any of our political differences.
This year we are celebrating the 200th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the United States and Russia. Today the breadth of our cooperation is impressive, given where we were less than a generation ago. We are working hard to face the 21st century challenges of nuclear nonproliferation. Our space programs are almost symbiotic. More and more, as the Russian Federation stands on the threshold of WTO membership after our historic bilateral agreement last November, our countries are linked by strong economic and trade ties.
Our cooperation has also extended into global health. The citizens of our countries, and of the world, have gained much from strategic health partnerships forged over the last fifty years. As this Forum demonstrates, we are successful because the breadth or our work extends well beyond our two governments, including universities, think tanks, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector.
I'm glad to see that with Forums like this one, our scope is expanding to also address the fundamentals of a sound education in public health. Only a few years ago, former Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson spoke here about public health and health diplomacy as the University was just establishing the School of Public Health. This year, the first graduating class from the School of Public Health will receive their degrees.
With the increasing public awareness of public health issues, it was also appropriate that Russia chose infectious diseases as a priority of its G8 Presidency in 2006. Infectious diseases have the potential to wreak havoc on labor markets, private industry, and the overall economy. During its G8 presidency, Russia helped advance global efforts related to the innovative financing of immunizations and vaccinations, and expanded research on critical infectious diseases. Creating the next generation of public health leaders and practitioners is just as important as producing the next wave of medical technologies.
It also makes sense that Russia in 2006 made Health and Education two of its four National Priority Projects. First Deputy Prime Minister Medvedev was right to call these investments in Russian health care and education "unprecedented." If sustained over the coming years, they could lead to dramatic improvements in demographic trends and quality of life.
In 2006, Russia also reemerged as an international health donor, with contributions of $270 million to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and $20 million for the World Bank Malaria in Africa Program. And Russia also pledged $18 million for the WHO Polio Eradication Program, which continues the good work that Dr. Salk and Dr. Sabin, and Dr. Chumakov and Deputy Minister Zhdanov, started way back in the 1950s at the height of the Cold War.
To succeed in this business, progress in both education and health must go hand in hand. Again, that's why events like this conference are so important. I'd like to take a minute to recognize one organization that has done a particularly admirable job in fusing these two objectives: the Russian Red Cross. For years, the Russian Red Cross has worked tirelessly with the American Red Cross and with the global network of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies to fight tuberculosis, ensuring that patients take their medicines regularly to prevent the bacteria from becoming drug-resistant. The Red Cross has also been a leader in raising public awareness of the dangers of HIV/AIDS and how to prevent its spread.
Both American and Russian businesses are also doing their part to combat both HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis. Gazprom is a strong backer of the Russian Media Leadership Partnership Against AIDS, which is spearheading public awareness campaigns about HIV/AIDS on Russian television, including MTV Russia. Johnson and Johnson supports shelters in St. Petersburg for street children, many of whom are HIV positive. Russian carmaker Avtovaz has established an employer-based healthy workplace program in the city of Tolyatti in Samara Oblast, where the prevalence of HIV cases is among the highest in Russia. Eli Lilly and Company is a crucial partner in combating the spread of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis by training Russian medical professionals and assisting Russian drug manufacturers to produce some of the key medicines to treat the disease.
The U.S. and Russian Governments have also worked together in several pilot regions in Russia to develop best practices in the care and treatment of tuberculosis. The Central TB Research Institute in Moscow and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta are engaged in joint research to track the effectiveness of TB drugs and to monitor drug resistance. We are also collaborating to establish the Novosibirsk Tuberculosis Research Center as a world renowned center of excellence for TB medical education and diagnostics.
We have a great deal to gain by working together to combat HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. Thanks to continued vigilant efforts, tuberculosis infections have stabilized here in recent years, and the number of cases of TB in prisons has significantly declined. Russia has also successfully stamped out dozens of outbreaks of Avian Influenza among birds in the past couple of years. And now Russia is playing a leading role within the CIS by committing $45 million to establish the Vector State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology near Novosibirsk as a regional flu center and ultimately as a WHO collaborating center for influenza.
With the achievement of greater stability and prosperity in Russia in recent years, it makes sense to increase investment in health, education, and infrastructure, that is, in both physical and human capital. And naturally, it makes sense to look for international partners in those efforts, such as the United States. Both Russia and the United States have benefited from our partnership programs on tuberculosis in the past decade, and on HIV/AIDS under President Bush's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in the last two years. Most recently we've been working together to keep Avian Influenza at bay and to be prepared in case this deadly new virus develops into a global pandemic like that which engulfed the world in 1918.
But let me return to Sabin and Chumakov. The development and refinement of the Sabin polio vaccine was the first great step in Russian-American cooperation on global health. This partnership soon led to the Soviet Union joining the World Health Organization, where in 1958 Deputy Health Minister Zhdanov proposed a worldwide campaign against smallpox. Senator Frist, who has done so much through his own leadership to promote health diplomacy and partnerships, will talk more about the tremendous success of the smallpox effort tomorrow. Today, our collaboration in global health continues. We have become partners in battling emerging threats, such as HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Avian Influenza.
Our joint science and research matter not just to our countries, but also to the rest of the world. We work together not only in multilateral fora like the G8 and the WHO, but also in joint bilateral projects. We did just that in 2006. Under President Bush and President Putin's Bratislava AIDS Initiative, American and Russian laboratory specialists worked together to establish HIV/AIDS diagnostic and testing laboratories in Ethiopia and Namibia.
We want to continue this joint work. I am delighted to announce today that together with the Russian Ministry of Health and Social Development and with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs we plan to build on the successes of the Bratislava Presidential Initiative and launch a new Health Partnership Initiative. The United States is committing $2.5 million this year to deploy Russian and American HIV/AIDS and infectious disease experts in third countries to strengthen laboratory capacity and address global public health threats together. The Initiative will also expand the work of AIDS Training Centers in St. Petersburg and Moscow to respond to the HIV epidemic both in Russia and abroad. We will continue working in African countries, and now, we will also reach out to neighboring CIS countries to strengthen laboratory and infection control efforts where the need is great.
It's amazing to think what a long way medical science and public health have come since Dimitriy Ivanovskiy discovered the very first virus, the tobacco mosaic virus, while he was still a student here at the University. When Ivanovskiy first began to explore the tiny universe of viruses, he probably never dreamed or imagined the frightening array of new viruses that would confront us today, from HIV to Avian Influenza, from SARS to Ebola. But as Dr. Sabin and Dr. Chumakov showed, we can win the war against these threats to public health. And it is not only Russians and Americans that will benefit. The whole world will benefit from what we can accomplish together.
I have been an American diplomat for 25 years, and I am not naпve, either about the challenges ahead in relations between Russia and the United States, or about the wider health challenges that face all of us. But I remain at heart an optimist. Now whenever I say that here, one of my Russian friends will inevitably remind me of one of the many Russian definitions of an "optimist" – someone who thinks that tomorrow will be better than the day after. I am more hopeful than that. We will have our share of difficulties. But your important initiative to launch this First Annual Global Health Forum is a powerful reminder of what we, Russians and Americans, can accomplish together.
I wish you great success, in this conference, and in the months and years ahead.
Thank you.