Myriad challenges face international health today, from the prospect of hundreds of millions of tobacco-related deaths in the twenty-first century, to the devastation of sub-Saharan Africa by AIDS, to the rise of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases in many countries still laid low by ancient communicable diseases. The tide of the tobacco epidemic is turning in Britain and in some other industrialised countries, but in these places further progress depends on greater use of proven life-saving interventions (such as those in the prevention of vascular diseases) as well as on appropriate responses to challenges posed by ageing populations, unhealthy lifestyles and major – but comparatively neglected – sources of disability such as mental and musculo-skeletal diseases.

The editors of this book have produced a lucid and thoughtful account of critical perspectives and tools that will enable students and practitioners to understand and tackle such prevailing problems in public health. This book’s appeal to health-care professionals from many different backgrounds should help to advance the interdisciplinary approach to health promotion and disease prevention that the editors themselves wisely advocate.