Preliminary datasets are now available for the 2006 Mali Demographic and Health Survey. PRI researchers may request it from the Data Archivist.

Measles epidemics in Niger fluctuate wildly from one season to another but the timing of the outbreaks always coincides with the end of the annual rainy season, according to an international team of researchers.

The erratic nature of the outbreaks, they add, underlies the need for greater surveillance to detect potential epidemics and a quicker vaccination response to control the disease.

The lead author of the study is Matthew Ferrari, research associate at Penn State’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics.

Citation: Ferrari, M. J., Grais, R. F., Bharti, N., et al. (2008). The dynamics of measles in sub-Saharan Africa. Nature, 451(7179), 679-684. (Available online to the Penn State community)

DHS has published 3 new working papers:

• Internal Migration and the Use of Reproductive and Child Health Services in Peru (Lekha Subaiya)
• Trends in Primary and Secondary Abstinence among Kenya Youth (Chi Chiao & Vinod Mishra)
• Spousal Agreement on Waiting Time to Next Birth in Sub-Saharan Africa (Tesfayi Gebreselassie & Vinod Mishra)

The number of South Africans living on less than $1 a day doubled between 1996 and 2005, according to a survey by the South African Institute of Race Relations (BBC News).

The Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report summarizes two recent PLoS Medicine articles examining the links between HIV/AIDS and development issues like poverty and food insecurity.

The Council of Science Editors organized a Global Theme Issue on Poverty and Human Development, in which science journals throughout the world simultaneously publish articles on this topic on October 22. 235 journals from developed and developing countries participated in the theme issue, including American Journal of Public Health, Health Education and Behavior, Journal of Adolescence, Reproductive Health Matters, and Science.

Penn State users can use the University Libraries Citation Linker to retrieve copies of individual articles.

Preliminary datasets are now available for the 2006 Niger Demographic and Health Survey. PRI researchers may request it from the Data Archivist.

The education budget of a single country like France, Germany, Italy or the United Kingdom outweighs education spending across the entire sub-Saharan African region, according to a new report from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. The Global Education Digest 2007 focuses on financing of education and includes the latest statistics on primary to tertiary education from more than 200 countries.

The Birth to Twenty study (“Mandela’s Children”) is following a cohort of South African children born in 1990 from birth to age 20. These children are the first cohort born into a democratic South Africa. According to the Birth to Twenty Web site, the study is “the largest and longest running study of child and adolescent health and development in Africa.”

An article in the International Journal of Epidemiology describes the study and provides a profile of the Birth to Twenty cohort. The article is available online via Open Access.

Citation: Linda Richter, Shane Norris, John Pettifor, Derek Yach, and Noel Cameron (2007). Cohort profile: Mandela’s children: The 1990 birth to twenty study in South Africa. International Journal of Epidemiology 36(3): 504-511.

The Uganda Atlas of HIV/AIDS Indicators 2004-05, available from Demographic and Health Surveys, combines the detailed geographic data collected in DHS surveys with other DHS data.