More than ever before, there is a global understanding that long-term social, economic, and environmental development would be impossible without healthy families, communities, and countries.

Since the reduction of risk factors is the scientific basis for primary prevention, the World Health Organization promotes the development of an integrated strategy for prevention of several diseases, rather than focusing on individual ones.

Such lifestyle factors such as cigarette smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, little physical activity and low dietary calcium intake are risk factors for osteoporosis as well as for many other non-communicable diseases.

That the AIDS pandemic is threatening sustainable development in Africa only reinforces the reality that health is at the center of sustainable development.

The development of the food industry for both domestic and export markets relies on a regulatory framework that both protects the consumer and assures fair trading practices in food.

The launch of the report coincides with the initiation by WHO of the global strategy for the prevention and control of osteoporosis, and I think a good partnership could be established in our common efforts to prevent osteoporosis.

Today osteoporosis affects more than 75 million people in the United States, Europe and Japan and causes more than 2.3 million fractures in the USA and Europe alone.

We are also in the process of defining how best to work together with food and other companies to address diet and physical activity factors in order to prevent chronic diseases.

An important lever for sustained action in tackling poverty and reducing hunger is money.

The dual scourge of hunger and malnutrition will be truly vanquished not only when granaries are full, but also when people's basic health needs are met and women are given their rightful role in societies.

Investing in health will produce enormous benefits.

You cannot achieve environmental security and human development without addressing the basic issues of health and nutrition.

A safe and nutritionally adequate diet is a basic individual right and an essential condition for sustainable development, especially in developing countries.

Contaminated food is a major cause of diarrhea, substantially contributing to malnutrition and killing about 2.2 million people each year, most of them children.

Cancers of all types among women are increasing.

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death in women.

Health is the core of human development.

Osteoporosis, as the third threat, is particularly attributable to women's physiology.

The burden of disease falls on the poor.

This double burden of disease is rapidly putting a serious brake on the development efforts of many countries.