Profiles of health and well-being give an overview of a country’s health status, describing data on mortality, morbidity and exposure to key risk factors together with trends over time. They are developed in collaboration with WHO European Member States. When possible, each report also compares a country to a reference group, which is in this report the whole WHO European Region and the European Union member countries prior to 1 May 2004. To make the comparisons as valid as possible, data are as a rule taken from one source to ensure that they have been harmonized in a reasonably consistent way. The data in the report are drawn from the European Health for All (HFA) database of the WHO Regional Office for Europe. The HFA data are collected from Member States on an annual basis and include metadata that specify the original source of data for specific indicators.