The socio-colonial history of Surinamese surnames applied to a validated surname list to identify ancestry in health research.

Around half of the population of Suriname, who are mainly of African and South Asian descent, migrated to the Netherlands at the end of the previous century, where they face higher perinatal and maternal mortality and up to 5 years lower life expectancy than European-Dutch. Analyses by ancestry are needed to address these inequalities, but the law prohibits registration by ancestry. Therefore, a list of Surinamese surnames was compiled and validated to identify the largest groups, African-Surinamese or South Asian-Surinamese ancestry in health research.

Field testing in Suriname of two blood pressure-measuring devices for low-resource and middle-resource countries, according to a WHO protocol.

Introduction: High blood pressure (BP) is known to be the greatest modifiable risk factor of cardiovascular diseases, of which 80% occur in low-resource and middle-resource settings. Yet, BP measurement in these countries remains extremely poor. In 2005, a WHO committee invited manufacturers to produce devices especially for use in low-resource settings.