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In this paper, we first describe the current state of health across the world. We then note that despite general good health, it is not everyone's experience and that differences in health among people frequently appear to be unfair. Health promotion is a movement committed to prevention and to creating opportunities for all people to live healthy lives. We examine the application of health promotion to people with intellectual disability. Finally, we bring equity, health promotion and intellectual disability together and ask to what extent people with these problems are victims of inequity. If they are – as seems likely – societies that have built their health services on humane values should assume greater responsibility for meeting their special needs, promoting their opportunities for health as well as managing their illnesses.

A confluence of stimuli is propelling academic public health to embrace the prevention of chronic disease in developing countries as its new frontier. These stimuli are a growing recognition of the epidemic, academia's call to reestablish public health as a mover of societal tectonics rather than a handmaiden to medicine's focus on the individual, and the turmoil in the US health system that makes change permissible.

The Vietnam Veterans Counselling Service (WCS) is a national counseling program for Australian Vietnam Veterans. The effectiveness of this service was evaluated by comparing the symptom levels of 146 VVCS clients with 546 "matched" nonclient controls. Multivariate linear regression techniques were used to control for differences between the two veteran groups prior to estimating the contribution of VVCS exposure to current symptom levels Health outcomes assessed ranged from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder to alcohol dependence and problems in dyadic adjustment. The positive influence of service-based counseling was most evident in the areas of alcohol dependence and dyadic adjustment These findings are consistent with the view that the major benefit of treatment programs such as the VVCS is that they facilitate veteran coping responses, thereby enabling them to "live well" with their symptomatology.

Chronic diseases are the dominant issues for global public health in terms of mortality, morbidity, and cost, and they have been identified as such for >40 years. Despite their predominance, however, these diseases—cardiovascular disease (CVD), diabetes, cancer, pulmonary disease, mental health, and dementia—attract little attention in the public health curriculum and even less from the funding community. We explore the rationales that have perpetuated this inability or unwillingness to match need with effort. We examine 3 concepts that impede changing this relationship: 1) the traditional contextual view of public health that emerged, to be sure with great success, in the post–World War II era; 2) the failure of public health to transition to economic development as the goal of health assistance; and 3) the unwillingness of public health to confront social, political, and economic policies as the foci of upstream drivers of the public's health. We conclude with a discussion of the need for public health to expand its horizon and tear down the walls of the silos that inhibit the emergence of relevant global public health.HighlightsGlobal chronic disease attracts scant attention from academia or funding agencies.Global public health needs a stronger focus on economic development.Public health needs to participate in national policy formulation, not merely react to it.Academic public health needs to break down the silos and walls of academia.