Thirty-five years of Brazil's Unified Health System (SUS): from Alma-ata to the climate challenge

In 2025, Brazil celebrates 35 years of the Unified Health System (Sistema Único de Saúde–SUS), one of the late twentieth century's most ambitious social innovations: a middle-income country of continental scale and vast inequalities that, in its 1988 Constitution, made health a constitutional right and a duty of the state. Laws 8.080 and 8.142 of 1990 translated this principle into practice and defined the system's organization. From a global health perspective, the SUS stands as one of the most far-reaching national commitments to the principles of “Health for All” set out in the 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration, anticipating later agendas linking universal health coverage and resilient public health systems.