Immunization Newsletter, v.46, Special Issue on Brazil, May 2024 

Abstract

Brazil is a vast country, home to more than 200 million people and with a public, universal and free health system. Over the more than 35 years since its creation, the Unified Health System (SUS) has made significant progress, including achieving high vaccination coverage for a large number of vaccine-preventable diseases. Immunization actions in the country are coordinated by the National Immunization Program (NIP). It is in this context that the Brazilian office of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), in support of initiatives by CONASS and CONASEMS, has organized a collection of experiences to be published as a supplement to the PAHO Immunization Bulletin. To this end, in partnership with CONASS and CONASEMS, six successful experiences were selected from the different regions of the country, carried out by municipalities out of approximately nine hundred proposals submitted, and three developed by states out of fifty submitted. When these experiences were selected, they were able to present them at events run by the managers themselves, such as the CONASS Technical Chamber on Surveillance, held in May 2023, and at the XXXVII National Congress of Municipal Health Secretariats - CONASEMS, held in July of the same year. They also presented their reports at the XXV National Immunization Conference, held in September 2023 by the Brazilian Society of Immunizations (SBIm), one of the world's largest events on the subject. The reports you can read now in this Immunization Bulletin were written directly by the professionals who developed the experiences presented here. You can feel in them the vivacity of a robust, creative health system that has been fed, since its creation, by the energy of anonymous people who fight every day to defend every life and guarantee the population universal and comprehensive access to health, recognized in Brazil as a right for all and a duty of the State by the Federal Constitution.