http://www.thelancet.com/

Health inequalities are increasingly on the public-health agenda, and halving the number of people living in absolute poverty by the year 2015--the main international development goal--would do more to reduce health inequalities and improve global health status than would any other measure.Unfortunately, given the limited international commitment to this goal and the population growth in the countries where most of the desperately poor people live, this goal is unattainable. The best approach to the reduction of health inequalities is to focus on the underlying structural determinants of social and economic deprivation, an approach that is notably absent from the agenda of governments. Public-health efforts are all too often targeted at the "downstream" effects of exclusion.