EDITOR’S CHOICE The poetics and statistics of the average life: from ASJ Tessimond to Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems

Epidemiology is concerned with group-level risk1 and nowhere is this more clear than in the Health and Demographic Surveillance Systems (HDSS) that gen-erate the basic but essential information on births, deaths, fertility, migration and, increasingly, data for computing burdens of common diseases in the poor-est countries. These necessary resources do not get the long-term funding and scientific recognition they de-serve. In this issue of the IJE, we attempt to redress this situation in our small way by launching a new series from the Global South. The International Network for the Demographic Evaluation of Populations and Their Health (INDEPTH) Network, set up in 1998, is an umbrella organization currently made up of 36 centres, running 43 HDSS, which covers 3.2 million people. Located in low- and middle-income countries, where routine universal registration of vital statistics is lacking, INDEPTH member HDSS sites provide a medium-term solution to the lack of population-based health data in Africa, Asia and Oceania. The series is introduced in an edi