EDITORIAL

This is one more issue of Saúde e Sociedadethat focuses on its original proposal for the interdisciplinary development of the public health field, which reveals not only the comprehensiveness of its technical-scientific and theoretical-methodological frameworks, but also the diversity of its target audience. This issue is a perfect example of this multiplicity, due to the approached themes and to the ways of dealing with them.

Youth is the theme of three papers (two of which will be specially commented), equally concerned about understanding the forms of youth participation in times of intense social and political transformations. By means of a review of the literature in English and Portuguese published in the last 10 years, Cynthia Boglossian and Cecília Minayo help us learn about the low socio-political engagement in this stage of life and about the emergence of new forms of participation that, according to the authors, require the creation of analytical categories that allow us to understand the motivations of these forms of protagonism.

On the other hand, but in a complementary way, the "anti-ugliness" and "anti-age" dogmas are the object of a socio-anthropological reflection on the symmetry, texture and the modern pattern of the human face. Without neglecting the biological and aesthetic dimension, Clayton Neves Camargos and colleagues emphasize that the beauty standards that are so valued socially speaking result from the very development of contemporary culture, whose sub-products in the field of science and industry gradually transform them in an essential good, something to be consumed on a daily basis, therefore indispensable to survival.

The same social transformations, allied with demographic and epidemiological transitions, promote a recurrent production of research into ageing, and many of these studies use analysis references that belong to the fields of social sciences and epidemiology. This theme is the object of one of the experience reports that are part of the present issue, and its inclusion in our Journal may lead to a reading that swings between youth and ageing. It deals with the routes of healing and care of elderly individuals with hearing loss reported by Scheffer and colleagues, an exploratory study supported by a qualitative survey that allowed them to identify different ways of solving the problem, whether they lie in professional health care or not.

Two papers in this issue approach research in Brazil.

One of them analyzes the research environment in the general health research system in Brazil, and its results deserve to be broadly disseminated. Noronha, Silva, Szklo and Barata focused on the perception of research group leaders working at Brazilian institutions, as well as the perception of decision-makers of scientific policies and users of research results. They describe the priorities reported by the interviewees, like relevance of the investigated problems, incentive to the researcher's career, and transparency in funding. And they highlight the aspects that were considered more and less positive concerning the health research environment in the country, such as, respectively, access to scientific information, opportunities for results communication and publication, and researchers' training; and salaries, career incentives and transparency in funding.

The paper by Samira Valentim Gama Lira and colleagues, in turn, approaches the scientific production on health promotion in postgraduate courses. The description is performed by means of a systematic review of the collection of theses and dissertations of Capes (Brazilian Ministry of Education's foundation for the qualification of higher education professors). It is interesting to mention that in the field of knowledge related to public health, the authors identified, among other aspects, that the qualitative research into the theme was predominant.

The principles and potentiality of the qualitative-participatory focus is the subject of "Notes on the second external evaluation of the training program in epidemiology applied to the services of Brazil's National Health System - EPISUS". According to its authors M. Lúcia M. Bosi and Ricardo J. S. Pontes, this is the fourth evaluation generation, and it was necessary to carry out a conceptual delimitation referring to the concepts of evaluation, qualitative and participatory. The qualitative dimension revealed aspects that enable to focus on the daily relationships of the health programs and practices.

The health promotion theme was the object of two more papers, approached both in relation to mental health (by Juliana Reale Caçapava and colleagues) in a service of the municipality of São Paulo in its interface with the public policies, and in relation to the problematizing notion of biopower, a bibliographic-exploratory study carried out by João Leite Ferreira Neto and colleagues.

The focus of many research studies in the last 10 years, the Family Health Program is also present in this issue.

Here, the quantitative study conducted by Stela H. Telles and Ana M. Carvalho Pimenta on strategies to cope with the burnout syndrome, involving 80 community health agents from the municipal service, provides the profile of these workers, describes worrying situations related to their feeling of deteriorated self-perception regarding their own work, lack of satisfaction and emotional exhaustion and, on the other hand, their search for religious practices as one of the strategies they use to cope with negative feelings, associated with focusing on the problem and fantastic thinking.

The toolkit used by family health teams in Curitiba (Southern Brazil) and an initiative of institutional analysis of the Program with services from the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte (Southeastern Brazil) are two experience reports that can complement information on ways of implementing the PSF in Brazil.

The environmental question was approached in an epidemiological outline of the ecological type to analyze the "classic" correlation of the diarrhea disease with drinking-water quality in Vitória (Southeastern Brazil), and also in the proposition of an indicator to evaluate environmental determinants that interfere in human health in the scope of municipal responsibilities.

Last, but not least, Luís A. C. Carvalho, Luiz F. Scabar, Djalmo S. Souza and Paulo Capel Narvai carried out a bibliographic research and a documental analysis to describe the origin, apogee and decline of the set of procedures in oral health and the significance of these practices to the oral health national policy throughout the 14 years they were in force. The main legacy of this experience undoubtedly was the alteration in the dentistry practice model prevailing in the public sector, redirecting it to health preventive and promotional actions.

I hope you have a profitable reading!

Mara H. de Andréa Gomes

On behalf of the Editorial Board

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  05 Oct 2009
• Date of issue
  Sept 2009