When a Brazilian Vaccination Record Has No Stamp or Signature

What We Received

A client submitted a single-page Brazilian municipal vaccination printout titled 'Relatório de Vacinas Antigas (Hygia)', generated by the Hygia information system of the Prefeitura Municipal de Londrina (Municipal Government of Londrina), in the state of Paraná. The page listed seventeen childhood vaccinations administered between April 2003 and May 2007 at two municipal health units. The certified English translation was needed as supporting vaccination evidence for a USCIS filing — the kind of record a civil surgeon reviews when completing an I-693 medical examination report.

The printout was captured directly from the browser interface used by clinic staff: a printed coat of arms of the Municipality of Londrina in the upper-left corner, the report title centered with the print timestamp right-aligned, the patient's Hygia ID and name on two lines, a 17-row table, and 'Save / Print / Close' action labels at the bottom with the internal Hygia URL underneath. There were no signatures, no ink stamps, no embossed seals, no notarial wet ink — nothing that a US-trained reader would recognize as authentication marks on an official record.

Inside the table, the vaccine column carried Brazilian National Immunization Program shorthand: HEPATITE, ANTIPOLIO, TRIPLICE, TETRAVALENTE, ANTI-AMARILI, TRIP VIRAL, BCG. The dose column carried equally compact abbreviations: REFOR, UNICA, REF02. The dates were in DD/MM/YYYY format. The Health Unit column listed two short codes — MMLB and MARABA.

How We Handled It

We rebuilt the printout's layout one element at a time. The coat of arms in the upper-left was represented in brackets as a seal block ('[SEAL: Coat of arms of the Municipality of Londrina]'), with the issuing-office name to its right ('Municipal Government of Londrina / Municipal Health Service'). The centered title became 'Old Vaccines Report (Hygia)'. The print timestamp '05/05/2026 09:02' was right-aligned and converted to 'May 5, 2026 09:02'. The Hygia ID and the patient name retained their position. The body table kept its five columns, its grid borders, and its row order; the 'Save / Print / Close' action labels and the system URL ('http://10.1.102.5/sw/hygia_aplicvacina_rel.php?chave=9328483') were reproduced at the bottom.

For the vaccines, we translated each SUS abbreviation into the clinically recognized English equivalent and used it as the cell value in the body. HEPATITE became 'Hepatitis', ANTIPOLIO became 'Polio', TRIPLICE became 'DTP (Triple)', TETRAVALENTE became 'Tetravalent', ANTI-AMARILI became 'Yellow Fever', TRIP VIRAL became 'MMR (Viral Triple)', BCG stayed as 'BCG'. Dose abbreviations were expanded the same way: REFOR became 'Booster', UNICA became 'Single', REF02 became '2nd Booster'. The Health Unit short codes — MMLB and MARABA — were left as printed in the source, because they are proper names of municipal facilities, not abbreviations of a translatable phrase.

We added a Translator's Note to the certification page rather than scattering bracketed notes through the body — system printouts read more cleanly when the data table is left undecorated. The note covers four things in one place: that the source is a system-generated printout with no signatures or stamps; the Portuguese-to-English glossary for every vaccine and dose abbreviation; the DD/MM/YYYY → Month DD, YYYY conversion convention used throughout; and an explicit statement that MMLB and MARABA are facility codes, not translatable phrases. The reviewer reads the note once and then reads the table at face value.

Expert Note

"The source is a system-generated printout from the Hygia information system of the Prefeitura Municipal de Londrina (Paraná, Brazil). No handwritten signatures or ink stamps are present on the document; the only graphic element is the printed coat of arms of the Municipality of Londrina in the upper-left corner. Vaccine-name shorthand used by the Brazilian National Immunization Program has been rendered with its standard English equivalent: HEPATITE = Hepatitis; ANTIPOLIO = Polio; TRIPLICE = DTP (Diphtheria-Tetanus-Pertussis); TETRAVALENTE = Tetravalent (DTP + Hib); ANTI-AMARILI = Anti-amarílica (Yellow Fever) — appears truncated in the system output; TRIP VIRAL = MMR (Tríplice Viral); BCG = BCG (tuberculosis). Dose abbreviations have been expanded: REFOR = Booster (Reforço); UNICA = Single (Única); REF02 = 2nd Booster (Reforço 2). The Health Unit codes MMLB and MARABA refer to municipal health facilities in Londrina and have been preserved as printed. Dates in the original appear in DD/MM/YYYY (Brazilian) format and have been rendered as Month DD, YYYY."

Natalia VegaIberian & Latin American Legal Translator

Stray asterisks and dotted-line fragments in a handful of the source cells were scan and printout noise (the underlying Hygia table cells were blank); they were omitted from the translation, and the omission was acknowledged in the Translator's Note rather than reproduced as junk characters that could be misread as data.

The Outcome

The certified translation was delivered to the client for inclusion in their USCIS filing. The Translator's Note positions the absence of stamps and signatures as a known characteristic of system-printout documents — not a gap left by the translator — so a civil surgeon or USCIS reviewer evaluating the translation alongside the original can read both at face value.

Brazilian SUS-system printouts are a common form of vaccination evidence for Brazilian applicants going through the I-693 medical examination, and we handle them on the same template across municipal Hygia, Cadastro Vacinal, and e-SUS Vacinação variants. Aligning the English vaccine names with the civil surgeon's worksheet vocabulary (Tdap, IPV, MMR, Hep A/B, Varicella, etc.) lets the reviewer cross-walk doses without translating a second time at the desk.