USP launches digital database to strengthen Brazil's legal framework for health emergencies

In early May, as a hantavirus outbreak aboard a ship docked in Spain made headlines, the familiar cycle began again: silence giving way to alarm, speculation about pandemic risk flooding social media, and with it, the predictable surge of misinformation. Deisy Ventura, a professor at the University of São Paulo's School of Public Health, has watched this pattern repeat enough times to recognize its danger. The real threat, she argues, is not just the disease itself but the whiplash between indifference and panic—the false sense that health crises are discrete events separated by periods when we can simply move on.

But moving on is precisely what prevents preparedness. The infrastructure that saves lives during emergencies is built in the quiet years between them, through sustained investment in public health systems, legal frameworks, and institutional memory. Brazil's vaccination program stands as proof: decades of work created a world-class immunization system, now threatened by the very misinformation that thrives in the gaps between crises. Yet even well-prepared nations with strong public health traditions can fail if their leaders deny the threat. COVID-19 taught that lesson brutally.

In response, researchers at USP's Center for Health Law Research and the School of Public Health launched a digital database in May 2025 called Direito(s) nas emergências—Rights in Emergencies. The project, supported by the Pan American Health Organization and Brazil's Ministry of Health, cataloged and analyzed more than one hundred federal regulations governing public health emergencies, making them searchable and accessible to policymakers, researchers, journalists, and the public. The regulations are organized by their status, scope, issuing authority, and whether they are binding or advisory. Users can search by year or keyword, or browse through a structured index of themes and subtopics. Future phases will add state and municipal regulations and expand the platform's functionality.

The database reveals a troubling landscape. Brazil's emergency health legislation is fragmented, scattered across legal and sub-legal instruments, incomplete, and in many cases outdated. The most comprehensive law the country has—Law 13.979 from 2020—was written specifically for COVID-19 and is no longer in effect. The current legal framework does not reflect the principles or experience of Brazil's unified health system, nor does it incorporate lessons from marginalized communities or the extensive jurisprudence of the Supreme Court. The project was coordinated by Fernando Aith and Ventura, drawing on researchers from multiple USP graduate programs and the Center for Health Law Research, and was launched at the School of Public Health on May 8 to an audience that included representatives from the Pan American Health Organization, the Ministry of Health, state and municipal health councils, the National Health Council, the National Human Rights Council, the Public Defender's Office, the Federal Public Ministry, and numerous civil society organizations including the COVID-19 Victims Association and groups focused on food security and scientific communication.

The database emerged from a recommendation made during a voluntary external evaluation of Brazil's health emergency capacities, conducted by the Pan American Health Organization and the World Health Organization in 2024. The assessment found that Brazil needed to update its repository of legal instruments related to the International Health Regulations—the primary mechanism for controlling the international spread of disease, now binding on nearly two hundred countries—and assess their effectiveness across sectors. In Brazil, public health emergencies encompass epidemiological situations like outbreaks and epidemics, but also disasters and situations of abandonment, such as the emergency declared in Yanomami territory in 2023.

Ventura's deeper concern is not the database itself but what it exposes: the absence of a coherent national policy for health emergency response. A working group representing diverse stakeholders, including the Center for Health Law Research, delivered draft legislation and regulations to the Ministry of Health last year. Nothing changed. The questions that remain unanswered are far more consequential than whether hantavirus will spark another pandemic. What activities are truly essential during a health emergency? What obligations do employers and the state owe to workers in those sectors? How can emergency funding reach the health system without electoral interference? How can responses based on non-scientific evidence be blocked? Is it lawful to restrict movement without providing adequate social protection, including food security? What are the limits of government authority when people refuse isolation, quarantine, testing, or mandatory treatment? How far can vaccination or mask mandates extend? Would it constitute organized crime to deliberately gather crowds during a pandemic peak, or to spread false information through official government accounts?

These are not academic questions. Hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths occurred in Brazil during COVID-19. The database is meant to serve not as an archive of past failures but as a tool to build the legal and institutional scaffolding that might prevent the next one. Whether that happens before the next crisis arrives remains uncertain.