London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

We are delighted to welcome Dr Nísia Trindade Lima, the new President of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), to the School to introduce the work of Brazil’s most important health institution.  Nísia Trindade Lima, a highly respected researcher, teacher and sociologist, is the first woman to chair the institution in its 116-year history.  She joined Fiocruz in 1987 and has previously held positions as Director of the Casa Oswaldo Cruz (the Foundation’s institute dedicated to the History of Health and Sciences), Director of the publisher Editora Fiocruz, and Vice-President of Teaching, Information and Communication.  Her research and teaching interests include the history of science and health, especially the social sciences, and Brazilian social thought.  In 2016 she created the Fiocruz Network of Social Sciences and Zika, for studying and developing public policies relating to the human dimensions of the epidemic.

The mission of Fiocruz is to promote health and social development, generate and disseminate scientific and technological knowledge, and be an agent of citizenship.  The Foundation runs more than a thousand research and technological development projects, which produce knowledge for the control of diseases such as AIDS, malaria, Chagas’ disease, tuberculosis, hanseniasis, measles, rubella, schistosomiasis, meningitis and hepatitis, and other topics related to public health, including violence and climate change, and the history of science.  Fiocruz is the main non-university institution for training of human resources for the Unified Health System (SUS) and for science and technology in Brazil.  Fiocruz has one of the largest public pharmaceutical laboratories in the country – the Drug Technology Institute (Farmanguinhos) – which contributes nearly 40% of the drugs purchased by the Ministry of Health from official laboratories.  Fiocruz also has one of Brazil’s largest public laboratories for vaccine production: the Immunobiological Technology Institute (Biomanguinhos), which manufactured nearly 130 million doses in 2008.  Fiocruz units offer a variety of health services connected teaching and research activities.