The upcoming EAHMH conference will be in Lisbon, Portugal, 4-7 September 2013. The conference will be on the theme of ‘Risk and Disaster in Health and Medicine’ and it will be co-organized by the Universities of Évora and Lisbon. Risks and disasters have always been central issues in health and medicine. They illuminate the interfaces between science, medicine, environment, economy, society, culture and politics. Responses to preventive measures have often reflected tensions between the perceived wider social and economic benefits of interventions and the short-term costs imposed on individuals, specific social groups or society at large. One issue raised by such tensions has been whether individual freedom is deemed less important than the health of the community. Threats of epidemics have provoked local, national and international agencies to adopt drastic measures, consciously balancing the risk of disease against the economic risks posed by the disruption of trade or the implementation of expensive sanitary or environmental-protection measures whose cost effectiveness was difficult to foresee.