Vulnerability, Care, and integrality: conceptual reconstructions and current challenges for HIV/AIDS care policies and practices

Abstract

Health practices in general, and the response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in particular, are going through a critical and challenging period in Brazil’s current social and political context. This essay aimed to discuss some of these challenges and the conceptual constructs that are considered relevant as resources for facing them. The reflection highlights resistance to biomedicalization, to individualizing approaches and to the abandonment of the perspective of human rights as major challenges in the fight against AIDS, and discusses how the reconstructive concepts of vulnerability, care, and integrality, developed in the context of the health reform, the conformation of the Unified Health System (SUS), and the very construction of the Brazilian response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic can bring relevant subsidies to resist the dismantling of the achievements conquered and the construction of new emancipating paths for collective health.