[Popular education as a tool for redirecting strategies to deal with infectious and parasitic diseases].

There has been a comprehensive debate among different methodological approaches in Primary Health Care Services which inform different types of action to deal with infectious diseases, some of them emphasizing the community involvement in the search for solutions. This study aimed to clarify methodologies for popular education in the health field, specifically those most appropriate for the present institutional context, besides analyzing their meaning in dealing with infectious and parasitic diseases. The study involved a health center on the outskirts of the city of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil. While working to improve this clinic's educational practices, the author attempted to identify and investigate the difficulties and potentialities in the relationship between health professionals and the population. He also focused on showing how cultural, cognitive, and subjective issues can both hamper and facilitate the health services' functioning, indicating the need for health organizations to deal with such issues in a systematic and clear-cut way. This action-based research thus centers on participant observation, whereby involvement in the problems of malnourished children led to a series of changes in the relationship with the local community.