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This year's Annual Balzan Lecture will be given by Sir Michael Marmot, University College London (UK), 2004 Balzan Prizewinner in Epidemiology. The aim of this lecture is to present some recent research on the project «Fair Societies, Healthy Lives». This project highlights the influence of social inequalities on health and life expectancy and tries to give advice on taking suitable action.

Auch am Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts bilden soziale Ungleichheiten von Gesundheit und Krankheit eines der zentralen gesundheitspolitischen Probleme moderner Gesellschaften. Ihre Erklärung ist allerdings vielschichtig. Das vorliegende Buch fasst nicht nur bisher vorliegendes Wissen zusammen, sondern zeigt vor allem neuartige Erklärungsansätze und daraus resultierende Folgerungen für die Gesundheitspolitik auf. Das Buch gibt die wesentlichen Ergebnisse einer mehrjährigen Forschungskooperation international führender Experten wieder, die im Rahmen eines Programms der European Science Foundation erarbeitet wurden. Schwerpunkte der Analyse sind: Lebenslaufperspektive - stresstheoretische Erklärungen einschließlich psychobiologischer Mechanismen - makrosoziale und systemvergleichende Untersuchungen. Die englische Originalausgabe ist bereits auf große Resonanz gestoßen. Der deutschsprachigen Leserschaft erleichtert die Lektüre den Anschluss an den aktuellen internationalen Forschungsstand. Darüber hinaus vermittelt sie konkrete Handlungsempfehlungen zu jedem der behandelten Themen.

Conditional cash transfer schemes, which use cash to incentivize uptake of basic health and educational services, are well established among social planners inlow- and middle-income countries and are now taking hold in high-income countries.

"Looking across many diseases, average health among mature men is much worse in America compared to England. Second, there exists a steep negative health gradient for men in both countries where men at the bottom of the economic hierarchy are in much worse health than those at the top. This health gradient exists whether education, income, or financial wealth is used as the marker of one's SES status. These conclusions are maintained even after controlling for a standard set of behavioral risk factors such as smoking, drinking, and obesity and are equally true using either biological measures of disease or individual self-reports. In contrast to these disease based measures, health of American men appears to be superior to the health of English men when self-reported general health status is used. The contradiction most likely stems instead from different thresholds used by Americans and English when evaluating health status on subjective scales. For the same 'objective' health status, Americans are much more likely to say that their health is good than are the English. Finally, feedbacks from new health events to household income are one of the reasons that underlie the strength of the income gradient with health in England"--Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit web site