HIV and STD Surveillance

With the ongoing HIV epidemic it is essential to monitor its development in different demographic areas and identify trends, and thus provide data for planning, designing, evaluating, and advocating.

Sentinel HIV surveillance has become the most important and useful monitoring tool in developing countries. It is a repeated cross-sectional sero-survey of easily accessible population groups such as pregnant women attending antenatal clinic, HIV prevalence of antenatal clinic attendees are an internationally accepted proxy indicator representing the HIV levels and trends in the general population. This can be combined with sero-surveillance of syphilis.

To further explain different HIV infection rates beyond the demography of the areas behavioural sentinel surveillance is carried out in the communities surrounding the sites

The programme supports annual HIV and syphilis sero surveillance in Mbeya, Lindi and Tanga for four demographic groups, namely urban, peri-urban, rural, roadside and border to reflect the different risks present in these areas. Support includes training of site personnel and supervisors, supervision of survey procedures, testing of specimen and analysis of data.

Behavioural sentinel surveillance was supported in Mbeya and Lindi.