Help us support the Horizon 2020 budget!

The European Brain Council (EBC) needs your help, your support and your brains!

EBC urges for your support in ensuring that the European Commission’s proposals and budget are approved without any reduction in the health spend.

The EC has put an ambitious proposal of €80 billion investment in research and innovation (Horizon 2020 /H2020), to boost growth and jobs, which is strongly supported by the EP.

Indeed we believe the best way to achieve this is to support the full R&D proposal put forward by the Commission, a proposal that is a vital investment for future competitiveness, jobs and growth of Europe.

At present vital discussions are being held by the European Commission (EC), European Parliament (EP) and EU Member States (European Council) on the EU budget 2014 – 2020.

The budget has come under increasingly heavy fire as European governments reel from austerity budgets and on-going financial crisis in the Eurozone and draconian spending cuts in EU budget are advocated by some member states.

This could seriously diminish the H2020 budget.

EU funding for health research represents today a mere 10% of the overall EU research funding budget (€6.1 billion out of €53.2 billion). To compare, in the US, the NIH invests on average 3.5 times more ($31.2 billion = €21.5billion) than the EU (€6.1 billion) in health research. This represents a striking disproportion between the burden represented by disease and the EU health investment.

Over the last few years we have provided evidence demonstrating the large and increasingly societal cost associated with brain disorders. Our recent study showed that the annual cost of brain disorders in Europe was 798 billion euros and is growing. But we have also provided solutions and demonstrated that timely intervention improves outcomes and will reduce cost.

The amount of health research and brain research in particular has increased over the last years from a very low base and much more needs to be done.

You can download the EBC letter to the 27 Ministries of Finances here.