South Africa - Participation in Africa Centre's HIV surveillance between 2003 and 2012

1.1.0

2015-02-23

The Africa Centre for Health and Population Studies has hosted a socio-demographic household surveillance in a rural sub-district of uMkhanyakude in northern KwaZulu-Natal (South Africa) since 2000. The surveillance area is 438 km² in size and includes a population of approximately 90 000 isiZulu-speaking people. The study area is characterized by high adult HIV prevalence (24% in adults aged 15 years and older in 2011) and high levels of poverty and unemployment (in 2010, 67% of adults over the age of 18 were unemployed). At any point in time, about one-third of the population under demographic surveillance does not physically reside in the surveillance area, although they are considered to be household members (membership is defined by household head). Demographic events and socio-economic data are collected on a regular basis from a key household informant.

Starting in 2003, a nested HIV surveillance was conducted among resident adults, who are asked to respond to some health and sexual behaviour questions and provide a dried blood spot sample which is tested for HIV. For each survey round, teams of two trained fieldworkers visit each eligible individual in his or her households. If a person is absent, the field workers make up to four repeat visits to the same household. Except for the first HIV surveillance round, which took place over 18 months starting in 2003, all subsequent rounds were done on an annual basis.

All adults residing in the area and who were able to provide informed written consent were eligible to participate in HIV surveillance. From 2003 to 2006, eligibility was restricted to women aged 15-49 years and men aged 15-54. From 2007 onwards, all persons aged 15 years and older were eligible.

Every year, an additional sample of 12.5% of non-residents was also eligible for HIV surveillance.

The population of eligible resident participants changes substantially on a yearly basis. Thus from 2004 onwards, at the beginning of each calendar year, a list of all resident persons eligible to participate in HIV surveillance was generated from information available in the demographic database. During fieldwork operations, some persons became ineligible “a posteriori”, because the information of death, out-migration or sickness was not available at the time the eligibility list was generated or because their situation changed.

Description of annual HIV surveillance datasets produced by Africa Centre is available on .

This dataset has been built using the annual datasets of the first 9 survey rounds of HIV surveillance, i.e. rounds conducted between 2003 and 2012.

Only data of resident members have been used, i.e. in each annual dataset, data concerning non-resident members (at that time) was excluded.

For each annual dataset, premature completion was recoded to identify individuals who appears “a posteriori” being ineligible for that specific survey round (due to out-migration, death or not being able to provide a written informed consent) and individuals who were eligible but not contacted.

This dataset contains 60,954 rows, each row corresponding to a resident member who have been eligible at least once for HIV surveillance between 2003 and 2012.

Kind of Data

Biomeasures data

Units of Analysis

Individuals