Protect, discipline and regulate: Health surveillance in Brazilian public health

Protect, discipline and regulate: Health Surveillance in Brazilian Public Health.
In this study, the organization of the Health Surveillance in Brazil is analyzed through models that gather needs, knowledge, organization dinamics and purposes of this specific working process, which is part of the public health system. Due to divisions within history, three distinctive periods are framed: the protection period, the surveillance/discipline period and the regulation period. This study intends to discuss the relationship between each period and the public, economic and social policies being implemented in the course of the construction of the Brazilian society.

Although a part of the Health System, Health Surveillance has been gradually moved away from the medical practice. Yet, it has increased its interface with productive process generating sanitary risk, which leads Economy to prevail. By considering the singularities of the Brazilian social formation, this study seeks to identify weather it is possible to sustain Health Surveillance as a part of the social rights policies in Brazil, irrespective of the international tendency for restructuring processes. The work comes from a theoretical construction based on dialectics and hermeneutics.