The article main objective is to analyze and compare the policies surrounding the use of salt in the treatment of two major diseases that raging in rural areas and the Amazon in Brazil during the national-developmentist period: the endemic goiter and malaria. Although they are very different diseases, the first is a carential disease and the second a parasitic disease, the struggle of doctors and nutritionists for the obligatory iodisation of table salt consumed in the country inspired the proposal of a cooking salt mixed with chloroquine and its free distribution in malarial areas where the use of DDT would not be effective. Methods designed to be simple - and thus efficient - to control and even eliminate such diseases, the use of cooking salt as vehicle to supply iodine and an antimalarial drug to the population collides with cognitive, economic, social and cultural factors. Some variables organize the historical analysis of these health programs: the consensus on the etiology of the disease, the degree of institutionalization of the community of specialists and their organization, the place of disease on the agenda of international health organizations, the locus of policy making and the existence of leadership scientific and policy formulation and conduct of policy and the consumption patterns of target populations.
Health Policy; Rural Endemic Diseases; Salt; History; Brazil