BACKGROUND Studies from various countries have observed worse population health in geographical areas with more income inequality. The psychosocial interpretation of this association is that large income disparities are harmful to health because they generate relative deprivation and undermine social cohesion. An alternative explanation contends that the association between income inequality an...

STUDY OBJECTIVE s: To examine changing inequality in the coverage of cervical screening and its relation to organisational aspects of primary care and to inequality in cervical cancer incidence and mortality. DESIGN Retrospective time trends analysis (1991-2001) of screening coverage and cervical cancer incidence and mortality in England. SETTING The 99 district health authorities in Englan...

OBJECTIVE We propose a new method to measure health inequalities caused by conditions amenable to policy intervention and use this to identify health differences between sexes and age groups. METHODS The lowest observed mortality rates are used as a proxy of unavoidable mortality risks to develop a new measure of health outcome - realization of potential life years (RePLY). The RePLY distribu...

Two geographers specializing in China analyze that country’s health care inequality from 1990 to 2008, for the purpose of: (1) examining spatial-temporal variations of health care inequality at multiple scales (the regional, provincial, and county levels); (2) exploring whether economic growth and transition to a market economy have exacerbated the unevenness of health care; and (3) analyzing t...

BACKGROUND The health workforce has a dynamically changing nature and the regular documentation of the distribution of health professionals is a persistent policy concern. The aim of the present study was to examine available human medical resources in primary care and identify possible inequalities regarding the distribution of general practitioners in Albania between 2000 and 2004. METHODS ...

We use data from the 1985, 1987 and 1991 United States Vital Statistics Linked Infant Birth and Death Records to assess the effect of statelevel economic inequality on an infant’s probability of death. We find that economic inequality is associated with higher neonatal mortality even after we control mother’s age and race and state characteristics that are likely to be associated with both ineq...

Evidence that poor children have a higher risk of dying in childhood than better-off children is accumulating fast. This evidence relates to deaths from all causes. This paper reports evidence showing the socio-economic gradient of child mortality by cause of death. It uses retrospective survey data from Cebu (the Philippines), and measures inequality using an index that is closely related to t...

BACKGROUND Social inequality in child survival hampers the achievement of Millennium Development Goal 4 (MDG4). Monitoring under-five mortality in different social strata may contribute to public health policies that strive to reduce social inequalities. This population-based study examines the trends, causes, and social inequality of mortality before the age of five years in rural and urban ar...

BACKGROUND Income inequality and national wealth are strong determinants for health, but few studies have systematically investigated their influence on mortality across the early life-course, particularly outside the high-income world. METHODS We performed cross-sectional regression analyses of the relationship between income inequality (national Gini coefficient) and national wealth (Gross ...