Network would be Africa's largest demographics project if it can sustain long-term funding.
South Africa's government has announced that it will expand the country’s existing demographic studies to create a project that will be the largest of its kind in Africa — tracking the health, income, and educational attainment of around 1% of South Africa’s population. South Africa has had three demographic surveillance projects running since the mid-to-late 1990s, based in Mpumalanga and Limpopo in the northeast, and KwaZulu-Natal on the east coast. These have been able to track trends such as a growth in life expectancy as the country rolled out antiretroviral drugs to fight the HIV epidemic. But the long-term sustainability of such studies — which have been funded by non-governmental donors — is a perennial concern, says Kobus Herbst, deputy director of the African Health Research Institute, based in Durban, which runs the study in KwaZulu-Natal. So the government’s investment is particularly welcome, he says. All the existing surveillance projects are in rural areas, providing only a narrow view of national population trends, says Gray. “The rural sites have been critical for understanding things like how antiretroviral rollout plays out in districts,” she says. But they don’t catch emerging patterns of disease linked with modern city life, driven by factors such as pollution, work-related stress and dietary changes. Of the four new surveillance nodes in the planned network, three will be based in South Africa’s biggest cities: Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban. The existing surveys already cover around 250,000 people, but each collects different types of data, so their measurements cannot be compared or integrated together. During the first three years, the surveys will be linked up, and the Limpopo one will be expanded. By the end of the three-year period, a total of 300,000 people should be included in the project, says Herbst. The target of 500,000 people will be reached, hopefully, in five years' time, he says. The government funding will cover the full health and socio-demographic surveys, as well as fund linkages to national health records and the collection of dried blood spots from adult participants once a year for HIV testing, Herbst says. To do more — such as sequence DNA — funding will be sought from external donors.
