Abstract
Although sanitation problems seem to have been resolved, every day thousands of children around the world die of diseases caused by the lack of it. Nevertheless, sanitation remains virtually invisible in the Brazilian health sector agenda. The objective of this study is to investigate the importance given to this topic by researchers from the public health field. The relevance of the subject was mapped out in CNPq's research groups, Brazilian scientific journals, and public health graduate programs. The results showed that few of these programs addressed the topic of sanitation. As a consequence, few public health research groups study and publish about sanitation in the journals assessed. The potential factors that could be behind the limited interest in sanitation shown by the public health academic community are discussed.
Highlights
Inadequate sanitation-related diseases affect vulnerable populations all over the world
The study scrutinized the presence of this topic in three main arenas of scientific research in Brazil: the databases of research groups run by the Science and Technology Development National Council (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico, CNPq), to find out which Brazilian researchers are investigating sanitation; the major national scientific journals of public health; and public health graduate programs, to find out what subjects were investigated, and may become the research focus of novel graduate researchers
To adequately analyze the results presented above, the historical trajectory of the sanitation sector in Brazil should be reconstituted in order to shed light on and contextualize how it fits into the Brazilian public health agenda nowadays
Summary
Inadequate sanitation-related diseases affect vulnerable populations all over the world. Public/collective health emerged as an independent field in Brazil in the 1970s, drawing on knowledge from the social sciences and humanities and criticisms of traditional health, of which “sanitarianism” was a part This movement was grounded in prevention-based interventions that involved applying technologies (sanitation, immunization, and vector control) to the population at large, but especially to the poor and excluded strata of society, with centralized, state-controlled planning and execution. It could be, that sanitation came to be associated with the naturalistic universalism of medical knowledge, criticized by researchers from the field of public health (Paim, Almeida Filho, 1998; Nunes, 1994; Birman, 1991). An analysis of the information gathered was used to build up a picture of sanitation in the field of public health and to discuss hypotheses that might explain the findings
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