Health in Brazil
The health of Brazil’s general population is affected by many factors. These factors include climate, pollution, and health care. There are also many international health organizations in the country, including the Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information and the Edumed Institute for Education in Medicine and Health.
The Brazilian government has done various studies to discern what the most pressing health issues are in Brazil today. Their findings have shown the most serious problems to childhood mortality, motherhood mortality, mortality my non-transmissible illness, and mortality caused by external causes like transportation, violence, and suicide. These studies found that there was a two and a half percentage of childhood mortality, and about 73.1 deaths of mothers per one hundred thousand children born. There were also over one hundred and fifty deaths and seventy three deaths per one hundred thousand inhabitants caused by heart and circulatory diseases and cancer, respectively. Finally, there are about seventy-two deaths by external causes per one hundred thousand inhabitants which accounts for about fifteen percent of all deaths in the country. Brazil also accounted for about forty percent of all malaria cases in the Americas in 2002. Almost ninety-nine percent of these cases are concentrated in the Legal Amazon Region which is only home to about twelve percent of the population.
A large, public, government managed system called the SUS or Sitema Unico de Suade is the min component of the Brazilian health system and it serves a majority of the population. A private sector that is managed by health insurance funds and private entrepreneurs serves the rest of the population. The SUS was established in 1988 by the Brazilian Constitution, and its three basic principles are universality, comprehensiveness, and equity. The universality component is to ensure that all citizens have access to health care services regardless of skin color, income, social status, gender, or any other variable. Comprehensiveness is an understanding that a citizen’s health is the result of many variables like employment, access to land, income, sanitation services, access and quality of health services, psychic, social and family conditions, and education, and everyone should be entitled to full and complete health care that includes prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation. Equity is a statement that health policies should help to reduce inequalities between groups and individuals, so that those who need it most have access to health care.
SUS also put in place guidelines regarding implementation, the strangest of which is popular participation. This policy states that all policies must be planned and supervised directly by the population through local, city, state, and nation health conferences. This is usually regarded as a very advanced form of direct democracy, and many other similar initiatives have been taken in other Brazilian sectors of society.
Recently, the government has also tried to reform the national health care system by making records for all citizens instantaneously available to all medical facilities via computers. This information includes prescriptions and keeps up to date numbers of epidemic infections.