Report on the impact of infrastructures on alcohol policy across Europe – Deliverable 3.4, Work Package 8
Alcohol Measures for Public Health Research Alliance (AMPHORA)
The importance of building and strengthening infrastructures within the field of public health has increasingly been recognised internationally (1-6) and a call to build capacity has been raised, along with alcohol policy as a specific public health topic (7-9). Explanations for the enormous health gap between eastern and western European countries were found in the institutional infrastructure (as the ‘causes of the causes’) (7). Public health law has been one of the leading contributors to the extension of life expectancy in the 20th century but legal infrastructure supporting public health law in many areas is still underdeveloped and non-uniform (10). Infrastructure generally is understood as the overall societal infrastructure and would include generic public health infrastructure, health care infrastructure as well as alcohol policy infrastructure, while the three last-mentioned concepts overlap.