Countrywide Mortality Surveillance for Action (COMSA) aims to improve the lives of Sierra Leoneans by producing annual data on mortality and causes of death at national and subnational levels for government and health policy-makers to use.
Countrywide Mortality Surveillance for Action (COMSA) aims to improve the lives of Sierra Leoneans by producing annual data on mortality and causes of death at national and subnational levels for government and health policy-makers to use.
COMSA is supporting the SL government to develop and implement a sample registration system (SRS) of births and deaths with cause of death using verbal autopsy. SL-SRS tracks 5-8% of total population, deaths, stillbirths, and pregnancies.
COMSA is collaborating with CHAMPS to support Minimally Invasive Tissue Sampling (MITS) for 200 child deaths, with Bo District as the starting site. Biological confirmation of child deaths is a novel addition to understanding cause of death.
COMSA helps the SL government by strengthening routine death reporting, mortality system integration, and use of data, including linkage with the 117 phone reporting system. As a result, we hope to improve the local statistics on child and adult mortality.
The targeted VA tool will carry out a sub-study on adult febrile deaths. The focused study in Bo explores whether malaria causes a substantial proportion of adult acute febrile deaths as it does for children.