Mortality transition over a quarter century in rural South Africa: findings from population surveillance in Agincourt 1993-2018
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Mortality burden in South Africa since the mid-1990s has been characterized by a quadruple disease burden: HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis (TB); other communicable diseases (excluding HIV/AIDS and TB), maternal causes, perinatal conditions and nutritional deficiencies; non-communicable diseases (NCDs); and injuries. Causes from these broad groupings have persistently constituted the top 10 causes of death. However, proportions and rankings have varied over time, alongside overall mortality levels. OBJECTIVE: To provide evidence on the contributions of age and cause-of-death to changes in mortality levels in a rural South African population over a quarter century (1993-2018). METHODS: Using mortality and cause-of-death data from the Agincourt Health and Socio-Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS), we derive estimates of the distribution of deaths by cause, and hazards of death by age, sex, and time period, 1993-2018. We derive estimates of life expectancies at birth and years of life expectancy gained at age 15 if most common causes of death were deleted. We compare mortality indicators and cause-of-death trends from the Agincourt HDSS with South African national indicators generated from publicly available datasets. RESULTS: Mortality and cause-of-death transition reveals that overall mortality levels have returned to pre-HIV epidemic levels. In recent years, the concentration of mortality has shifted towards older ages, and the mortality burden from cardiovascular diseases and other chronic NCDs are more prominent as people living with HIV/AIDS access ART and live longer. Changes in life expectancy at birth, distribution of deaths by age, and major cause-of-death categories in the Agincourt population follow a similar pattern to the South African population. CONCLUSION: The Agincourt HDSS provides critical information about general mortality, cause-of-death, and age patterns in rural South Africa. Realigning and strengthening the South African public health and healthcare systems is needed to concurrently cater for the prevention, control, and treatment of multiple disease conditions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".