ministers of environment and health of the 53 countries in the WHO European Region (and a number of international governmental and non-governmental organizations) will meet in Parma, Italy, on the occasion of the Fifth Ministerial Conference on Environment and Health. One major item in their agenda is going to be the increasing challenge of inequities in exposure to environmental hazards. These...

INTRODUCTION Promoting health equity is a key goal of many public health systems. However, little is known about how equity is conceptualized in such systems, particularly as standards of public health practice are established. As part of a larger study examining the renewal of public health in two Canadian provinces, Ontario and British Columbia (BC), we undertook an analysis of relevant publi...

BACKGROUND The role of gender inequities in explaining women's access to reproductive health care was examined in four countries (two sub-Saharan African and two South Asian countries). The extent of gender inequities varies across and within countries, and is rooted in the different cultural practices and gender norms within these different countries, and differences in the status and autonomy...

This paper addresses an often overlooked aspect of climate change impacts on child health: the amplification of existing child health inequities by climate change. Although the effects of climate change on child health will likely be negative, the distribution of these impacts across populations will be uneven. The burden of climate change-related ill-health will fall heavily on the world's poo...

There are many reasons for the health inequities that we see around the world today. Public policy and the way society organises its affairs affects the economic, social and physical factors that influence the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age - the social determinants of health. Tackling health inequities is a political issue that requires leadership, political cour...

This paper comments on the principles that informed Rwanda’s successful efforts to adapt its health system to population needs, and more specifically to reduce health inequities. The point is made that these may be universally applicable for countries as they deal with the challenges of post-2015 health agenda.

Public Health Education and Promotion, a new section of the journal Frontiers in Public Health, provides a refreshing forum for those readers who have traversed the familiar landscape of near-intractable health inequities on a national and global level and desire new knowledge on how best to ameliorate health inequities and the social factors that perpetuate them. The new “frontier” in public h...