To Russia, with love (and back again, hopefully)

Timonin et al article adds weight to a need to address geographical health inequalities in Russia.1 They show, for the first time, how inequalities between districts are much greater than the inequalities between larger regional geographical containers. The difference in life expectancy between the best-performing and worst-performing groups of districts, each accounting for 5% of the Russian population, was as large as 16 years for men and 10 years for women. The mortality inequality was 2.6 times larger between districts than it was between regions. There is hope that these geographical inequalities in health can be reduced with the appropriate political will and infrastructure. Evidence from England has shown how life expectancy …