Journal
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC HEALTH
Volume 27, Issue -, Pages 14-17Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/eurpub/ckx160
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- European Commission, in the framework of the Eurothine project (Health and Consumer Protection Directorate-General) [2003125]
- EURO-GBD-SE project (Health and Consumer Protection Directorate-General) [20081309]
- DEMETRIQ project (Research and Innovation Directorate-General, FP7-CP-FP grant) [278511]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The persistence of socioeconomic inequalities in health, despite all that has been done to reduce social and economic inequalities in many European countries, is one of the great disappointments of public health. In this paper, I summarize the results of a series of studies into the explanation of variations and trends in inequalities in mortality in three European regions: the Nordic countries with their puzzlingly large inequalities in mortality, Southern European countries with their miraculously small inequalities in mortality and Central & Eastern European countries in which inequalities in mortality have disastrously exploded since the early 1990 s. The results of these studies show that inequalities in mortality are remarkably variable and dynamic, which suggests that it may be possible to reduce them if we exploit the entry-points for policy that these studies have also identified, such as poverty, smoking, excessive alcohol consumption and lack of access to health care. At the same time, another lesson is that health inequalities are influenced in sometimes unexpected ways by factors that are not under our control, and that we cannot expect to eliminate these health inequalities soon.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available