Health & Demographic Surveillance System Profile: The Ifakara Rural and Urban Health and Demographic Surveillance System (Ifakara HDSS)

The Ifakara Rural HDSS (125 000 people) was set up in 1996 for a trial of the effectiveness of social marketing of bed nets on morbidity and mortality of children aged under 5 years, whereas the Ifakara Urban HDSS (45 000 people) since 2007 has provided demographic indicators for a typical small urban centre setting. Jointly they form the Ifakara HDSS (IHDSS), located in the Kilombero valley in south-east Tanzania. Socio-demographic data are collected twice a year. Current malaria work focuses on phase IV studies for antimalarials and on determinants of fine-scale variation of pathogen transmission risk, to inform malaria elimination strategies. The IHDSS is also used to describe the epidemiology and health system aspects of maternal, neonatal and child health and for intervention trials at individual and health systems levels. More recently, IHDSS researchers have studied epidemiology, health-seeking and national programme effectiveness for chronic health problems of adults and older people, including for HIV, tuberculosis and non-communicable diseases. A focus on understanding vulnerability and designing methods to enhance equity in access to services are cross-cutting themes in our work. Unrestricted access to core IHDSS data is in preparation, through INDEPTH iSHARE [www.indepth-ishare.org] and the IHI data portal [http://data.ihi.or.tz/index.php/catalog/central].