This spring, conversations across our city are focusing on the state of the economy, public safety, and education. These are all essential issues – but there is another critical topic that cuts across all of them: health. In Baltimore, we see that the currency of inequality is years of life, and the opposite of poverty is health and well-being. The average life expectancy in Roland Park, for example, is 84 years; in Downtown/Seton Hill it is 65 years — nearly a 20-yeardifference. For decades, many of our citizens have experienced concentrated poverty and rampant disparities that are glaringly obvious when we compare health outcomes across neighborhoods.

The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was recently urged by medical specialists to properly label combination of medications to warn the public of their effects to a person's health.