The Shodagor Longitudinal Health and Demography Project (SLHDP), established and directed by Kathrine Starkweather, works with boat-dwelling and recently-settled Shodagor communities in Matlab, Bangladesh. The field team has been collecting longitudinal demographic, reproductive, and anthropometric data, as well as economic and childcare data since 2017. We regularly conduct focus groups and open-ended interviews, and have collected cross-sectional and longitudinal social network data. We also began collecting project-specific biomarker data, including markers of general and specific infection via dried blood spots, and point-of-care tests to measure HbA1C (an indicator of diabetes) and Hemoglobin (an indicator of anemia).
Funding for data collection has come from the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and the National Science Foundation.
current project: Seasonal behavioral ecology of respiratory infections
With funding from the National Science Foundation, working in collaboration with co-PI Ashley Hazel and co-Is Drs. Nurul Alam and Rubhana Raqib, the SLHDP collected data over 14 months, in 2023 and 2024, to examine the relationships between seasonal environmental changes, close contact social networks and mobility, and respiratory viral transmission. The project collected data via: (1) weekly structured interviews, which collected data on individual-level close contacts and mobility and symptoms of respiratory illness; (2) thrice-seasonal collection of anthropometric measurements (height, weight, skin folds); (3) thrice-seasonal whole capillary blood samples via dried blood spots to be coupled with illness symptoms and assayed for C-reactive protein (CRP) to determine recent general infection, and IgG for RSV, Influenza A & B, and SARS-CoV-2 to determine recent specific infection; and (4) thrice-seasonal point-of-care tests for current infection with the above specific respiratory viruses. As of August 2024, data entry and cleaning are in process in preparation for data analysis.
