European Public Health News * President's column * EUPHA office column--EUPHA 1992-2012--Time to expand the family! * Message from the Who Regional Director for Europe: HIV Cases Continue to Rise in Europe--Who European Region Launches New Action Plan to Bring the Epidemic Under Control * 5th Annual European Public Health Conference 2012: All Inclusive Public Health, Portomaso, St Julian's, Malta,

Abstract

In this first European public health news of 2012, the need for European concerted action remains a top priority. Both for ongoing diseases such as HIV where immediate action in Europe is called for (Jakab) and for rare diseases, where European action will benefit the knowledge and treatment of these diseases (Montserrat Moliner). The role for EUPHA here is clear: support for our members and via our members; we are going in the right direction (Ricciardi) and we are planning the future (Zeegers Paget). # President's column {#article-title-2} The year 2011 has been a successful, packed year of further developing activities for our three strategic objectives: capacity building, knowledge building and policy building. It is not possible to list all our achievements over the year, so I would like to highlight some of them. The first achievement was our active involvement in the European ministerial meeting on health during the Polish presidency of the EU. The ministerial meeting was organized in Poznan, Poland, on 7–8 November and EUPHA organized a workshop on Health in all Policies. The workshop was organized together with the Polish presidency, the Polish Association of Public Health and the European Observatory on health systems and health policies. Background information included a draft policy brief on Health impact assessment from the European Observatory and EUPHA as well as an EUPHActs on Health impact assessment. Stan Tarkowski, past president of EUPHA, took the lead in organizing this workshop. It was the first time that EUPHA was this proactive at policy building level and the positive experience in Poznan will be continued in the coming years. The second achievement was the production of two new instruments for dissemination, capacity and knowledge building and support for our members. Two EUPHActs were produced (Environment and health; Health impact assessment) to provide a short (two pages) …