Health protection in Brazil: the National Sanitary Surveillance System

This essay presents the singular arrangement named Health Surveillance in Brazil and the specificities of its components: public Health Surveillance, Worker's Surveillance, Environmental Surveillance, Sanitary Surveillance, as well as the constitutional determination to carry out the actions of sanitary and epidemiological surveillance and Worker's Surveillance. The two national systems of protection and promote health are also presented - National Public Health Surveillance System and National Sanitary Surveillance System, with an emphasis on the regulatory issues in health made by the latter and some constraints to its action by the Legislative Branch. It reaffirms the Brazilian State's constitutional duty to protect health, and to provide the means for adequate functioning of the two systems, bearing in mind that defense of the public interest in health products and services means confronting oligopolies of transnational economic interests. This paper states the opinion that the financial constraints facing the Brazilian State from time to time cannot be allowed to prevail over the rights of citizenship, independently of the public underfunding of health in Brazil.