Join us for a talk by Barasa Otsyula, Professor of Surgery at Kenya’s Moi University School of Medicine and the Director and Principal Investigator of the Webuye Health and Demographic Surveillance Site.

Professor Otsyula will be visiting Duke between April 5 - 10. The Webuye DSS team is interested in establishing new collaborations for both retrospective data analysis as well as prospective studies. Professor Otsyula is looking forward to meeting members of  DuPRI and DGHI to discuss possible collaborations within the Webuye HDSS. 

Please contact Brian Vicini (brian.vicini@duke.edu) if you wish to meet with Professor Otsyula.

About the speaker: 

Barasa Otsyula is Professor of Surgery at Kenya’s Moi University School of Medicine and the Director and Principal Investigator of the Webuye Health and Demographic Surveillance Site (WHDSS). In 2007, Moi University College of Health Sciences established the WHDSS as a platform to generate high-quality, population-based, longitudinal demographic and health data important for planning at local and National level. In the absence of a vital registration system, such sites provide valuable information for health and population planning, including fertility rates, age-specific death rates, and migration rates.

About WHDSS:

The WHDSS is located in a rural agricultural community with a high poverty rate but rapidly fluctuating economic opportunities and changing burden of infectious and non-infectious diseases. Bi-annual census rounds follow a population of 70,000 people; at each round household information is updated, and all births, deaths, in-migrations and out-migrations are recorded. Pregnancies, recent illnesses, health seeking behavior, and disease prevention behavior are captured. The WHDSS methodology allows integration of new topics into census rounds making it a dynamic platform for research and disease surveillance, as well as an important tool for policy-makers.