The World Health Report 2003: conveying new insights while refurbishing old ideas

This quotation from the recent World Health Report represents one characteristic feature of the partly new public health map drawn by the World Health Organization in its report released on 18 December (1). As many times before, the Report raises the question about justice when addressing striking variations between the poor and non-poor within countries and between geopolitical areas. The report unsurprisingly calls for a global health emergency while at the same time alerting us to a couple of success stories. The report conveys a ‘‘new’’ inequality where the traditional gap between North and South is shifting to that within ‘‘developing’’ countries and between their lowand high-mortality countries, sub-Saharan Africa being the extreme of the latter, drastically left behind as a result of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. There, 23% of global births occur, 46% of global child deaths and 90% of all HIV/AIDS deaths among children.