Cohort Profile: Health and Demographic Surveillance System in Mirzapur, Tangail, Bangladesh

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

In low- and middle-income countries such as Bangladesh, limited administrative and health infrastructure preclude the continuous monitoring of health indicators at the community level [1]. Nationally representative Bangladesh Demographic and Health Surveys (BDHSs) are conducted to monitor vital statistics and important health and demographic indicators. As BDHSs are conducted every 3–4 years, the surveys overlook short-term changes and seasonal variations in health data [2]. BDHSs are also limited by the coverage of broader groups of communicable and non-communicable diseases [3] and long intervals between the surveys often cause recall bias and fail to capture the immediate impact of health interventions. While such surveys provide overall national estimates, they may not capture specific community-level dynamics and are insufficiently powered to support intersectional analyses [4, 5]. To fill this data gap and foster innovative community-level interventions, a surveillance system was established in the Mirzapur subdistrict of Bangladesh in 2007.