The papers of this issue show that the Saúde e Sociedade journal firm its editorial commitment in disseminating scientific knowledge in Public/ Collective Health on the interface with social and human sciences.

All papers posted here take the social - its phe nomena, processes and relationships - as the base, scenario and material of the production's processes in health and disease, of the structuring of public po licies for the sector, assistance and care strategies, the propagation of health issues in the media, the production of uninitiated and scientific knowledge etc. The social, in that sense, is no longer middle ground, upon which the health bases itself - which features a perspective still predominant regarding the social in health - to win the place up, the social fabric in its political, economic, cultural dimen sions, upon which other phenomena, relationships and processes are built, produced, consolidated - including health.

Even regarding issues considered from the natu ral world, related to animals and to the environment, the papers published from the social setting, linking health and environment to the field of science, le gal system, economics, political and social justice domains. The papers position themselves in the contemporary field of environmental issues, away from the vision of environment as a nature external to social determinations.

In political dimension, the concept of equity is problematic considering the perspective of the right to health and its implications for the Brazi lian health system. In this dimension it can also be included two papers that focus on communication forms and discuss oral health in print media as well as the official disclosure materials and explanation of the child health policy. In both the discussion refers to the discursive paradoxes that either praise the action of the state public service, or suggest the user's migration to the additional system, look at the woman as subject of public policies in one mo ment and, in another, deal with it in an objectified way. The papers unveil the contradictions present in society as a result of the construction of an ideology of access to health.

In a way, and also in the dimension of politics, scientific medical knowledge is problematic in the papers that discuss their epistemological bases and practices: the biological as the base of the sickness, slipping from more inclusive defini tions about illnesses, the economic punishment for medical malpractice and the no-fault system as a form of compensation for the damage caused. These papers reinforce the discussion always present in the field of Public/ Collective Health in Brazil about the social dimension of scientific knowledge.

The body, its cares and the new forms of its reproduction are topics that occupy a large part of this issue in Saúde e Sociedade.

The idea of peripheral body, the self-therapeu ticalization dilemmas and moral issues that cross the reproductive health are some of the topics covered in this set of papers. Disease's care and social production consist of other subjects, which will be approached in this set. Care appears in the nucleus' dimension of primary sociability, family and companions of natural childbirth. Indigenous health appears in two papers as theme and as a report of their life situation, in which the inter pretative schemes of health-illness and care do not detach theirselves from the spell dimension, environmental contamination, disobedience to the elders and local knowledge of the search for the cure.

World of work - theme classically sociologi cal - and health appear in the borderline mode of illness. Impulsiveness, fragility of social ties and narcissism of the current culture produce a worker in search of success and fulfillment, wrecked on the obsession with productivity and in solitude.

Youth as an object of public policies and action in health is gaining increasingly more space on the field. In this issue, three papers on masculinity and sexual and reproductive health and about "needy" teenagers as well as chronic kidney disease put the category up for discussion.

Dynamism and complexity of social fabric, in which the phenomena of health-illness are included, become evident in several themes and in new objects here approached, inviting us to read it!

Aurea IanniEunice Nakamura

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