Welcome Address (Jorge Emmanuel, Asia Regional Mercury Conference)

Honorable Secretary Praveen Mishra, Director Rebecca Penafiel, DOH Directors and staff, colleagues with WHO and Health Care Without Harm, distinguished guests, international delegates, health professionals, and conference participants,

I welcome you on behalf of Mr. Renaud Meyer, Country Director of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and my UNDP colleagues. At this point, I would like to recognize the international participants from the following countries: China, India, Indonesia, Mongolia, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Thailand, United States, and Vietnam.

This conference is co-sponsored by the UNDP Global Healthcare Waste project funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF). The goal of the UNDP GEF Project is to demonstrate and promote best practices and technologies for reducing healthcare waste to reduce environmental emissions of persistent organic pollutants, in particular dioxins and furans, as well as mercury. The UNDP GEF Project involves the World Health Organization, Health Care Without Harm, and eight countries: Argentina, India, Latvia, Lebanon, Philippines, Senegal, Tanzania, and Vietnam. In addition to developing model facilities to exemplify best practices in healthcare waste management, demonstrating non-incineration technologies to treat medical waste, enhancing national training programs, and updating policies, the UNDP GEF project also promotes mercury-free devices and safe mercury-management practices, and disseminates information such as through conferences like this.

I hope you will all find the conference informative and useful. I encourage everyone to take full advantage of the presentations and discussions, the exhibits, and the periods during the breaks to further discussions, exchange experiences, share resources, and build contacts as this conference is a perfect opportunity to do all these.

Mercury-free health care is not just a vision; it is a global movement necessitating myriad initiatives on the ground and coordinated efforts on the local, national, regional and global levels. This conference will be a success if the information, resources, plans and strategies that come out of the conference are widely disseminatedto your colleagues, your health institution, your professional association, your local and national governmentsand if the plans and strategies are put into action. Together we can achieve the vision of mercury-free health care for all. Let us work together to make this a very productive and successful conference.