Austria Women Health Information
Reported, January 11, 2012
Only recently did one third of the members of the European Parliament sign a declaration regarding, among other things, the necessity of education on endometriosis and increased research on the development of this disease.
The European Parliament also only recently addressed the subject of osteoporosis in a workshop. These four diseases, together with cardiovascular diseases and smoking/lung cancer, will be the focus of the Austrian Presidency in the area of womens health.
The objective is to motivate the European Commission to produce an up-to-date report on women’s health that includes all 25 Member States, which the EP also only recently requested.
At national level, Austria is one of the first European countries to fulfil the recommendation of the World Health Organisation (WHO); in 1995 an Austrian report on womens health was produced. The new report for 2005 outlines the changes in the past decade and future areas of negotiation, offers a current overview of all health data relevant to women, the framework conditions of healthcare specific to women and approaches for targeted promotion of health.
In 1995 the World Health Organisation introduced a decade dedicated to women’s health issues. In promoting Gender Mainstreaming, the European Union set an important impulse too. Figures and facts show, that these initiatives lead to a better perception of the needs pertaining to women’s health. First of all, it is important to see women in their different contexts of life and their social stresses in association with harmful risks. Important topics in the future will be the feminisation of age, the increasing appearance of breast cancer, over-medication, especially in relation to problems of psychological health, social and women-specific answers to the rapid research pace in reproductive medicine and genetics. The trend of standardisation of the female body, and connected to it sanitary questions, remains to be still problematic.
