Adnkronos Rome, May 16 (Adnkronos Salute) – "We have the duty to continue telling this story of Armida Barelli", co-founder of the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore who died in 1952 of ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to whom the Nemo clinical center in Rome was dedicated. Like the Blessed "we do not give up the desire to be protagonists, regardless of the disease.
We do not give up being a resource for this country just because we do not speak, just because we breathe badly. We do not give up the right to have infrastructures that can welcome and support all our families". Thus Alberto Fontana, secretary of Nemo Clinical Centers, speaking today in Jesi, on the first day of the National Conference Aisla, Italian Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Association.
"We grew up in the association thinking that strength was the ability to lift, to support, to lighten the burden of the disease that weighs on our community - Fontana reflects - Today, however, what seems to dominate is another type of strength: a force that crushes, that excludes. And what we have learned from our history is that there is always something else that is considered more urgent than the needs and desires for happiness of a fragile community like ours. We are marginality, and it will be increasingly easy to forget about us because, when resources are few, we deal with large numbers. Small numbers, on the other hand, are forgotten. And so we must use all the stories of our community to remind the institutions of their duty: to start from the last, not the first".
For this reason "we must continue to fight - remarks the secretary of Nemo Clinical Centers - to build an attention from the institutions, which is not only declarative or legislative, but which translates into economic resources for our doctors, for our researchers, so that they can really make a difference. We must never forget this. The greatest challenge today is to tell that we are not the last, even if history has often placed us among the last. This, I believe, is what Armida Barelli also teaches us - remarks Fontana - She did not just dream of the Catholic University: she built it against everything and everyone, with her resources, with her conviction, with her power of persuasion. And this is why we must take that history and make it ours, put it in our calendar and celebrate it as an identity moment for our community", he concludes.