The Senate has definitively approved the law that allows to recognize the chronic headache as a social disease. The Chamber of Palazzo Madama gave the green light to the bill with 235 votes in favor 2 against and no abstention. To give the news is the deputy of the League, Arianna Lazzarini, first signatory of the PDL: “Our PDL was definitively approved in my first signature which recognizes chronic primary headache as a social disease. Now it’s finally law. Great satisfaction and a pinch of pride for this battle waged in 2011 as a councilor of the Veneto Region and now won in Parliament“. With the provision, chronic headache is expected to be recognized as a social disease when it comes in the form of: chronic migraine, chronic daily headache, chronic cluster headache, chronic paroxysmal migraine, unilateral short-lived neuralgiform headache with eye redness and tearing, migraine go on.
Just the deputy explains that Italy becomes, with this law, “the first country in Europe to adopt a measure like this: a first starting point and attention to the approximately seven million Italians who suffer from it, with a net prevalence of women and in the 20-50 age group. A concrete signal that turns the spotlight on this disease, so that the subjects suffering from it are no longer abandoned to themselves and can finally have hope and a new dignity of life. This is an invisible disease that today finally comes out of the shadow cone in which it has always been. We are not talking about the simple passing ‘headache’, but about a real chronic and disabling disease, much more widespread than you can imagine, which unfortunately has already led some patients to make even extreme gestures”.
The senator of the 5 Star Movement, Raffaele Mautone, talks about the disease now recognized by law during his speech in the Senate Chamber: “Chronic primary headache, as a recognized disabling pathology, refractory to therapy, is able to seriously or chronically limit or compromise the ability to cope with family and work commitments, involving in these cases, indirectly, also all work supply chain. The cornerstone of the measure in question is the recognition of pathology as a social disease”.
Mautone continues: “Politics, despite the multiplicity of different positions and different sensitivities, must, on certain problems, find and provide a unitary response, overcoming the divisions, to offer citizens the right, appropriate and necessary answers, capable of improving their quality of life, not only from an economic point of view, but also socially and relationally. In short, there must be the widest convergence on certain problems and the diseases recognized as social represent one of these cases. The 5 Star Movement has made the basic principle of the needs and resolution of citizens’ problems and can only give this measure a favorable vote for the due respect and recognition to those who really suffer and whose life is strongly marked by this pathology”.
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