BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES The availability of a type-specific pneumococcal vaccine for children is a worldwide problem. It is necessary to study the serotypes prevalent in a country before introducing a type-specific vaccine. The objective of the present study was to analyse the prevalence of Streptococcus pneumoniae serotypes in children suffering from acute otitis media or invasive pneumococcal...

At ages 11 through 12 years, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommends that preteens receive 1 dose of tetanus, diphtheria, and acellular pertussis (Tdap) vaccine, 1 dose of meningococcal conjugate (MenACWY) vaccine, and 3 doses of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. ACIP recommends administration of all age-appropriate vaccines during a single visit. ACIP also recommen...

Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) is an acute respiratory infection that infects millions of children and infants worldwide. Recent research has shown promise for the development of a vaccine, with a range of vaccine types now in clinical trials or preclinical development. We extend an existing mathematical model with seasonal transmission to include vaccination. We model vaccination both as a ...

PROBLEM/CONDITION Estimated trends in county-level vaccination coverage compared with national health objectives and associated with other variables (e.g., access to care, economic conditions, and demographic characteristics) have not been reported previously. REPORTING PERIOD 1995-2008. DESCRIPTION OF SYSTEM The National Immunization Survey (NIS) is an ongoing, random-digit-dialed telephon...

OBJECTIVE To analyze organizational correlates of immunization coverage among adolescents served by high-volume primary care providers in North Carolina. METHODS We randomly selected 91 clinics with at least 200 active records for patients ages 11-18 in the North Carolina Immunization Registry. For the 105,121 adolescents served by these clinics, we obtained immunization status for 6 vaccines...

In early 1990, an outbreak of measles occurred in Kerman, (population 257, 284) Iran. Overall, 475 cases were identified and four died (case fatality ratio 5.4 per thousand). Illness was limited primarily to children below 15 years of age 166 (22.3%) were in children under five, 573 (77%) between 5-14 and six (0.8%) above 15 years of age. The age of the cases ranged from five months to 35 y...

Measles eradication efforts have been successful at achieving elimination in many countries worldwide. Such countries actively work to maintain this elimination by continuing to improve coverage of two routine doses of measles vaccine following measles elimination. While improving measles vaccine coverage is always beneficial, we show, using a steady-state analysis of a dynamical model, that th...

UNLABELLED We present a suite of on-line tools to design candidate vaccine proteins, and to assess antigen potential, using coverage of k-mers (as proxies for potential T-cell epitopes) as a metric. The vaccine design tool uses the recently published 'mosaic' method to generate protein sequences optimized for coverage of high-frequency k-mers; the coverage-assessment tools facilitate coverage c...

BACKGROUND We compared vaccine coverage achieved by 2 different delivery strategies for the quadrivalent human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine in Tanzanian schoolgirls. METHODS In a cluster-randomized trial of HPV vaccination conducted in Tanzania, 134 primary schools were randomly assigned to class-based (girls enrolled in primary school grade [class] 6) or age-based (girls born in 1998; 67 sch...

OBJECTIVE To determine the optimal level of vaccination coverage defined as the level that minimizes total costs and explore how economic results change with marginal changes to this level of coverage. METHODS A susceptible-infected-recovered-vaccinated model designed to represent theoretical infectious diseases was created to simulate disease spread. Parameter inputs were defined to include ...