Health disparities: Understanding and promoting healthy communities.

This themed issue focuses on understanding and addressing several public health issues affecting communities today nationally and internationally. Health disparities, and global health in general, cover a large breadth of health concerns impossible to address in one issue. Here we provide a scope of some health disparities while focusing on health promotion and well-being of diverse populations, specifically within urban undeserved populations, rural communities in Peru, Roma minorities in Spain, and refugee communities. We focus on understanding contextual issue that affect health disparities as well as on examining the effectiveness of community-based interventions and community coalitions designed to address disparities.