To investigate the teaching of sanitary surveillance in undergraduate nursing courses in Brazil, seeking to know how this theme is addressed during the training of nurses.The universe of study was composed of Political-Pedagogical Projects, syllabi and curricula of nursing undergraduate courses from Brazilian public institutions. The quantitative analysis was developed through descriptive and inferential statistics, and for the qualitative part, a software was used to analyze the documents.A total of 153 public institutions' websites were analyzed. Of these, only 98 presented a Political-Pedagogical Project, a syllabus or a curriculum for on-line consultation, and only 2.04% of these programs had a specific discipline focused on teaching sanitary surveillance.The findings indicate that the contents related to the teaching of sanitary surveillance in nursing courses of public higher education institutions in Brazil, when present, are inserted, mostly, in other curricular components.