Health and equity in Latin America: utopias and reality.

Curitiba's Declaration during the 22nd World Conference on Health Promotion of the IUHPE highlighted equity as a prerequisite for health and as an essential element of health promotion, though not as an isolated aim. Latin America today is facing the loss of civil rights, austerity policies and social inequities, which together are increasing the gap between rich and poor and putting the health sector on alert. As health professionals, it is therefore our responsibility to provide cross-cutting analyses on how inter-sectoral public policies might represent utopias and realities in such a dramatic period of our history.

The 'locus' of health oversight in Brazil's Unified Health System - a place between the knowledge and the practices of social mobilization.

Supervision of a health system presupposes keeping an attentive eye on the health situation of populations, so as to understand health, illness and healthcare as indissociable manifestations of human existence. Taking this point of view, this article examines health practices from the basis of some of their processes of communication. These are markedly professional-centered in their logic, with their emphasis on scientific, vertical and authoritarian discourse, predominantly in the spaces of the Unified Health System (SUS).

Analysis of mortality from diarrheic diseases in under-five children in Brazilian cities with more than 150,000 inhabitants.

This study analyzes mortality from infectious diarrheic diseases in children under 5 years of age in Brazilian municipalities with more than 150,000 inhabitants, excluding State capitals. The annual mortality rates by municipality from 1990 to 2000 were analyzed using a multilevel model, with years as first level units nested in municipalities as second level units. The dependent variable was the yearly mortality rate by municipality, on the log scale.