Health care seeking for Childhood Diarrhea in Developing Countries: Evidence from Seven Sites in Africa and Asia

We performed serial Health Care Utilization and Attitudes Surveys (HUASs) among caretakers of children ages 0-59 months randomly selected from demographically defined populations participating in the Global Enteric Multicenter Study (GEMS), a case-control study of moderate-to-severe diarrhea (MSD) in seven developing countries. The surveys aimed to estimate the proportion of children with MSD who would present to sentinel health centers (SHCs) where GEMS case recruitment would occur and provide a basis for adjusting disease incidence rates to include cases not seen at the SHCs. The proportion of children at each site reported to have had an incident episode of MSD during the 7 days preceding the survey ranged from 0.7% to 4.4% for infants (0-11 months of age), from 0.4%…