Nanoscale: a new era for health sector

We end 2013 having achieved some of our goals: we launched the four booklets scheduled in our Sanitary Surveillance in Debate and were awarded by Capes with the inclusion of the journal in the interdisciplinary area of the Qualis system. Among other outreach initiatives, these have led to an increasing number of hits to our website and more importantly a significant increase in the number of manuscripts submitted for publication.\udThus, in principle, the future issues for 2014 are guaranteed, which allows us to envision the next step: starting the process of indexing in various databases! We are thus overcoming the difficult barrier of starting a new publication and advancing it within the current quality parameters.\udThis issue on nanotechnology and regulation, which ends 2013, paves the way for one of the magazine’s proposals: the publishing of thematic issues which leads to a necessary debate about new technologies and innovations arising from them and about the transformation of this knowledge into a commodity. We seek to provide information that supplements our readers’ knowledge regarding the impact of new technologies on the production sector. We also seek to provide information to the users of this technology that will help them assess, understand, discuss, and defend the potential risks of this technology to the environment, the health of the workers directly involved with the production, and the population in general. To this end, gaining the attention of state authorities, who may have historical issues with safety as a result of previous experiences with DDT, thalidomide, non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, and genetically modified organisms, is important. Furthermore, these considera-tions contribute to the societal positions of these globally distributed products — nanotechnology or similar products — available to everyone through either commercialization or consumption