From the Editors

Dear Colleagues,

We are proud to present the second issue of the Journal of Health Inequalities in 2016. More than one year ago, we embarked on the process of building the journal with the great support of our colleagues and friends. We are very pleased to welcome more external contributions in the present issue, but we are also proud to present several new research articles, reviews, and opinion pieces prepared by our close collaborators.
While our work on bringing the Journal of Health Inequalities to the highest standard is still ongoing, we are glad to see the improvements that are being made in every new issue. Despite the large competition in scientific publishing, our editorial team has been receiving an increasing number of publications from around the world. We are very pleased that our journal has become a firm fixture in the world of public health research, and we are grateful for the early positive appraisals it has received.
We would like to highlight three particularly important contributions to the present issue that tackle very different public health issues. The first one postulates zero tolerance toward cervical cancer death in Poland and Europe . Cervical cancer is still one of the few tumors that are almost completely preventable and treatable, and we should settle for nothing less. The second featured article deals with the growing concern about nicotine addiction from e-cigarettes among children and adolescents . The third article exposes Poland’s harmful taxation policy towards alcohol, one of the main risk factors leading to premature mortality, especially among young and middle-aged men in Europe . This policy is partly to blame for the fact that the consumption of vodka in Poland is at the highest level in history. This stands in contrast to the declining rates of smoking, which can be partly attributed to Poland’s consistent policy of increasing taxation on tobacco products.
In this issue of Journal of Health Inequalities, the reader will also find a number of reports from events devoted the 20th anniversary of the Polish Anti-Tobacco Law, as well as a report from the Conference of the Parties to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control that took place in India this year. In addition, a number of contributions summarise some of the findings of cohort studies conducted in Poland (PURE, Pol-PrAMS), as well as the “Keep fit!” programme. We hope you will find these and other articles in the current issue of the Journal of Health Inequalities interesting and thought-provoking.
The publication of the Journal of Health Inequalities would be impossible without the support of many extraordinary people and institutions. We would like to thank particularly the Provost of the Higher Vocational State School in Kalisz, Professor Magdalena Pisarska-Krawczyk and the Chancellor Kazimierz Matusiak. We are also indepted to the team of our publishers in contributing to our daily editorial work, in particular, the President of the Management Board of the Termedia Publishing House, Janusz Michalak, Production Editor Marzena Demska, and Donata Ziółkowska from the Publishing Department.

Andrzej Wojtyła, Witold A. Zatoński