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In September of 1979 during the "1st Meeting of Education and Employment of Superior Level Professionals in Public Health" at PAHO headquarters in Brasília, technicians, professionals, students and professors of the Public Health sector met aiming to found an association that could meet the interests of the different Post-Graduation courses of the area. As a result, they created the Brazilian Association of Collective Health Post Graduation (Abrasco), with the objective of acting like a mechanism of support and articulation between training, education and research centers of Collective Health for a mutual strength of the members and to enlarge the dialogue along with the technical-scientific community, health services, governmental and non-governmental organization, and society.
Now Abrasco has 34 institutional members (schools, institutes, Public/Collective Health, and Social and Preventive Medicine departments) and also more than 3.500 individual members (health professionals, professors and researchers). Abrasco supports and develops projects, seminars, workshops, publications and organizes the main congresses of Collective Health in Latin America. The last congress, in 2006, counted with the participation of ten thousand congresses. Besides that, Abrasco has twelve Work Groups (WG) and four interdisciplinary Commissions that promote seminars and thematic workshops, enlarging our scope of action to the whole national territory and Latin America. They also represent the Association in national and international academic and political forums, discussing and producing knowledge and interventions to the Collective Health.
During these two decades, Abrasco actively participated in Science and Technology forums and also at the National Health Council, building space for negotiation, and keeping an active voice in the formulation and monitoring of public policies in health, science and health technology. Since 2002, Abrasco is a member of the World Federation of Public Health Association (WFPHA) and in August 2006 promoted a joint Congress in Rio de Janeiro: the 10th World Congress on Public Health and the 8th Brazilian Congress on Collective Health.
Taking into consideration the difficulties of publishing scientific periodicals, the journals Ciência e Saúde Coletiva (Science and Collective Health) and the Revista Brasileira de Epidemiologia (Brazilian Journal of Epidemiology), both trimonthly, grew in importance in area and number of published articles since its creation in 1996 and 1998 respectively. The indexation of these two journals at important national and international databases shows its recognition and relevancy to the scientific community.
Some indicators of the extension of Abrasco's actions are: the amplification of the Postgraduate program in Brazil, the growing search for inflections at Collective Health Undergraduate activities, the progressive recognition that public health demands more integration between services and knowledge centers, as well as the incorporation of professionals at the services network, in special at the Family Health Program. Throughout its trajectory Abrasco seeks to reaffirm the historical principles of justice, equity and citizenship, restating its commitment with the development and renovation of Collective Health actions and information in Brazil, and also with the strengthening of the political debate and the improvement of Brazilians life quality.
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