SCANDINAVIAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC HEALTH

Public Health as we enter the third millennium, is facing challenges of new and re-emerging diseases. This health transition includes both changes in demographic patterns and the responses of health services to changing patterns of disease. However, while the ongoing transition allows for the chronic diseases of "welfare" and ageing it certainly also results from the "export" of well-known risk factors. Prevention often lies in the hands of public health policy and evidence-based implementation rather than in the search for new risk factors. Equity in health is on the public health agenda of most countries and agencies today. Inequity means unfairness - but nothing is as unfair as poverty, nor any epidemiological risk factor as strong. In bringing the chronic and pandemic nature of poverty and health needs to the attention of the world's conscience, a public health journal may be one lever. We will not avoid disclosing these value premises. They create a future challenge for public health researchers. Our ambition is to make this journal a forum for local, national as well as global health issues and we would like to recognise the challenge in bringing theory and methods nearer to public health efforts. We will certainly try to reflect the healthy multidisciplinarity that has become characteristic of public health globally in recent years. Epidemiologists, health economists and sociologists may thus contribute to conceptual and methodological development of the changing public health in terms of its efficacy, cost-effectiveness and social and ethical implications. Since January 2000 SJPH is under a new editorial management. We welcome contributions from North to South, on Nordic as well as International Public Health Developments, desk or field based studies, quantitative as well as qualitative. Our ambition is unequivocal - to foster and disseminate valid results from public health endeavours and, to the best of our ability, influence the current health research disequilibrium - that too little research effort is addressed to the bulk of health problems.