Survey-based socio-economic data from slums in Bangalore, India.

In 2010, an estimated 860 million people were living in slums worldwide, with around 60 million added to the slum population between 2000 and 2010. In 2011, 200 million people in urban Indian households were considered to live in slums. In order to address and create slum development programmes and poverty alleviation methods, it is necessary to understand the needs of these communities. Therefore, we require data with high granularity in the Indian context. Unfortunately, there is a paucity of highly granular data at the level of individual slums. We collected the data presented in this paper in partnership with the slum dwellers in order to overcome the challenges such as validity and efficacy of self reported data. Our survey of Bangalore covered 36 slums across the city. The slums were chosen based on stratification criteria, which included geographical location of the slum, whether the slum was resettled or rehabilitated, notification status of the slum, the size of the slum and the religious profile. This paper describes the relational model of the slum dataset, the variables in the dataset, the variables constructed for analysis and the issues identified with the dataset. The data collected includes around 267,894 data points spread over 242 questions for 1,107 households. The dataset can facilitate interdisciplinary research on spatial and temporal dynamics of urban poverty and well-being in the context of rapid urbanization of cities in developing countries.

Utilization of a molecular serotyping method for Salmonella enterica in a routine laboratory in Alberta Canada.

Salmonella is one of the most common enteric pathogens related to foodborne illness. Alberta's Provincial Laboratory for Public Health (ProvLab) provides Outbreak and Surveillance support by performing serotyping. The Check&Trace Salmonella™ (CTS) assay (Check-Points, Netherlands), a commercial DNA microarray system, can determine the serotype designation of a Salmonella isolate with automated interpretation. Here we evaluate 1028 Salmonella isolates of human clinical or environmental sources in Alberta, Canada with the CTS assay. CTS was able to assign a serovar to 98.7% of the most frequently occurring human clinical strains in Alberta (82.5% overall), and 71.7% of isolates which were inconclusive by conventional methods. There was 99.7% concordance in environmental isolates. The CTS database has potential to expand to identify rare serovars. With the anticipated shift to molecular methods for identification, CTS provides an easy transition and demonstrates ease-of-use and reduces the turn-around-time of a reported result significantly compared to classical serotyping.