, it was not until the past decades that they became study themes. Studies mostly deal with their historical construction in the social-politicaleconomic setting, contextualizing them with social relationships of production and consumption (3)(4) . In specialized VISAPAF literature, except for two studies (5)(6) , the absence of citation of who performs the sanitary control is signaled. There is also minimum information regarding the work process. This reveals a historical-cultural silencing of surveillance workers, which seems to transmit a feeling of devaluation for the actions developed by the group, which they understand and express on a daily basis. Is it possible to have health surveillance, or its history, without subjects? Who are the subjects responsible for health surveillance actions? How is the knowledge constructed and how is it manifested in daily practices?In this perspective, the social representation concept permitted an analysis of these questions, since it is contrary to the subject epistemology or the object itself (7)(8) . The investigation of VISAPAF workers' social representations regarding health surveillance also received attention. They integrate the cognitive and affective dimensions, which are structured on the social reality these subjects are inserted in. The assumption was to use, explicitly, when conducting the research, a knowledge modality generated through daily life communication, which has the practical goal of guiding behaviors in social situations. Hence, the approach was meant to consider the historical-socialcultural complexity VISAPAF was constructed in.
METHODOLOGICAL PROCEDURESIn this exploratory-interpretative study, a qualitative approach was adopted, using the theoretical concepts of Social Representations Theory. They constitute a vast field for studies intended to encompass the cognitive, affective and social dimensions (9) . As a complementary approach toMoscovici's theory, the perspective closest to the original propositions was adopted as a reference, led by Denise Jodelet, in Paris. This is explained because "this is the most used approach by researchers who intend to fully understand the representation of a given object by a given social set".
Site and SubjectsThree health surveillance centers were After that, the signifiers were further studied.They were obtained from the word calling test, through the associations or confrontations with the meanings explored from the reports obtained by the semistructured interviews. Taking into account the French studies' perspectives to reach the saturation rate of the interviewed subjects (11) , a number of 30 participants was obtained. They were chosen by the "snowball"technique. For each of the study fields, the first worker was randomly chosen and, at the end of the interview, the respondent was asked to indicate a colleague and so on, until reaching the planned number of interviews for each site. Whenever an indicated subject could not participate, the snowball process was repeated with a new indication. The differe...