A crude oil spill was first identified on the Brazilian coast on August 30, 2019, and has reached 4,334 km of coastline in 11 states of the Northeast and Southeast, with 120 municipalities (counties) and 724 locations, as of November 22, 2019 1. The disaster is considered the worst oil spill in Brazil's history and one of the largest on record in the world. The sequence of the phenomena cannot be attributed to chance, rather expressing probabilities that increase as a function of an unsustainable development model, environmental crisis, institutional unpreparedness for the prevention of expanded social and technical events, with obsolete legal frameworks that rarely punish the large conglomerates responsible for them, and discriminatory policies against vulnerable populations, among other weaknesses 2. The scale of the government's response, particularly that of the health sector, must be assessed in order to minimize the population's health problems and organize effective responses, given the potential occurrence of similar phenomena. Brazil has been stage to major environmental disasters of global proportions in the last five years. In 2015, the collapse of the Samarco company's Fundão mine tailings dam in Mariana, state of Minas Gerais, considered the largest of its kind on record, contaminated approximately 650 km of riverine and marine territories, with material and health damage that will persist for years. In 2018, involving the same mining conglomerate, the Córrego do Feijão tailings dam collapsed in Brumadinho, also in the state of Minas Gerais, resulting in 254 deaths to date 2. This represents the largest fatal work accident on record in Brazil. In the mining tragedies, the health sector at the three levels of government played a secondary role, without demonstrating the capacity to ensure quality healthcare for the affected communities. In this same spectrum, the frequency of non-natural tragedies has increased around the globe, revealing the hazardous unpreparedness of the public health sector to deal with large-scale disasters. Bhopal (1984), in India, with more than 200,000 deaths, Chernobyl (1986), in Ukraine, and Fukushima (2011), in Japan, are examples of such expanded risks. Accidents of similar magnitude to that of the oil spill on the Brazilian coast have increased, underlining the severity of health impacts and the need for organized responses to events characterized as public health emergencies 3. Examples of crude oil disasters of a global scale include Deepwater Horizon in 2010, which spilled 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, considered the largest on record,