Hansen´s disease and citizenship in brazilian health policy

Abstract

This article is the result of reflections from everyday professional work experiences at 1st Health Management of Santa Catarina State (GERSA), located in the municipality of São Miguel do Oeste (SC), which demands constant improvement and understanding of the socio-historical concepts regarding health and disease processes. This is a retrospective study of HD as a disease itself and its insertion in Brazilian public health policy. Historically considered as a typical poverty-associated disease, Hansen´s Disease is in a level in which the dominant paradigm of medicine has privileged, more specifically, the acute disease subject to be treated with high hospital technology, leaving out patients who have chronic diseases. The contamination occurs through direct contact from a sick individual to a healthy one. Despite the advances, Brazil has had a social life context, throughout its history, whose main indicative is the disparity of conditions among the citizens. On one hand, the technological advances benefit the living and eating conditions, the life quality; on the other hand, the misery conditions, hunger, diseases, lack of health care and, in a lot of places, restrictions to freedom and the restraint of having equality of possibilities for the totality of the “civil society”. However, only with the government´s, health professionals´ and population´s efforts all together, it will be possible to eliminate the disease and achieve the expected results.