When discussing the health of the prison population, Dr. Drauzio Varella is a name that will inevitably be mentioned. Possibly the best-known and most admired doctor in Brazil, he voluntarily dedicates his time to an occupation that few people are willing to do, even when paid: taking care of people in prison.
Dr. Varella says that in the 30 years he has been volunteering in the area, little has changed. In fact, it may have gotten worse, due to mass incarceration. The Brazilian prison population has grown fourfold since the turn of the century, and it is now the third largest in the world. Despite the state’s obligation to ensure the physical health of all inmates, prisons have become incubators for diseases, leading to ill health among inmates that can spread to wider society beyond the walls.
Several research groups are carrying out surveys and investigations of this population, using a range of approaches — including epidemiology, anthropology, and history — to find out how they live, what illnesses they suffer from, and how they die. This issue’s cover story describes some of these studies. Tuberculosis is the most concerning issue, with an incidence 100 times greater than among the general population. Other highlights include studies on the physical and mental health of women prisoners, which was covered in the last volume of Drauzio’s trilogy, Prisioneiras (Prisoners; Cia. das Letras, 2017), and extensive research on the living and health conditions of elderly people in prisons in the state of Rio de Janeiro.
Some researchers note that the prison system is like an amplified portrait of the most disadvantaged section of our unequal society — economically, educationally, and in terms of health resources. Rodolfo Hoffmann, an agricultural engineer from ESALQ-USP, has been studying income inequality for almost 60 years. His work focuses on economics research that includes agrarian reform and food insecurity. In an interview, Hoffmann discussed how he used to analyze large data sets manually in the pre-personal computer era.
Transmitting data securely through so-called quantum cryptography is the objective of the multi-institutional project Rede Rio Quântica, a network currently being established in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The field is not concerned with encoding the data itself, but with the remote generation of cryptographic keys that allow information to be received safely. It will be the first experimental metropolitan network that makes use of quantum mechanics in Brazil, with participating institutions connected by aerial lasers and fiber optic cables, as explained in a report.
We close with worrying news about wildfires in every Brazilian biome in the first half of this year—except the Pampas, which has been punished by torrential rain. At a time when uncontrolled fires in green areas are usually less common, the INPE recorded a significant increase, particularly in the Pantanal, which broke the undesirable record of the highest number of fires in the last 26 years, at 3,538. The Amazon saw its highest number since 2005 and the Cerrado had the worst period since 2010.
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