EURO-PREVOB: A new FP6 Coordination Action project to tackle obesity in Europe

Levels of obesity are increasing throughout Europe and there is a clear need for European countries to coordinate their scientific, regulatory and policy responses to this challenge.

EURO-PREVOB is a new European Coordination Action linking science and policy-making to tackle obesity. The project promotes and supports collaboration across existing networks, to tackle the social and economic determinants of obesity in Europe, including developments that recognise the specificities of sub-regional groupings of countries.

EURO-PREVOB is funded by the European Commission’s 6th Framework Programme, Priority 2.1 Scientific Support to Policy (SSP), and will run for three years, from 1 April 2007 to 31 March 2010. Coordinated by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, United Kingdom, under the leadership of Professor Martin McKee, EURO-PREVOB gathers together 14 participants from 11 European countries, with a multi-disciplinary team spanning a variety of key disciplines.

The specific objectives of EURO-PREVOB are to:

• Improve the understanding of the broad determinants of and inequalities in obesity;
• Identify policy initiatives that can impact positively on the determinants of obesity;
• Develop and pilot tools to assess the potential impact of policies on determinants of obesity that are appropriate to different sub-regional contexts;
• Develop and disseminate guidelines and recommendations for best practice.

Policy analysis tools are being developed to assist obesity policy analysis, identifying the opportunities and limitations of policy transfer to and among European countries. The project will assess the applicability of the tools in six sub-regions of Europe.

The EURO-PREVOB project’s findings will inform public health strategies for obesity prevention, and contribute to best practice in obesity prevention and to the broad dissemination and streamlining of actions against obesity in Europe.

Keywords

• Physical Activity

Countries

Austria, Belgium, Czechia, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Spain, Finland, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, Slovenia, Slovakia, United Kingdom