Neurological complications of immunizations have been recorded in the medical literature for many years, yet many physicians fail to recognize their clinical manifestations and identify their etiology. This is due in part to their rarity, and to the well-publicized, overriding public health benefits that make these complications easily overlooked. Yet they can be devastating despite the fact th...

In the United States, eradication and reduction of vaccine-preventable diseases through immunization has directly increased life expectancy by reducing mortality. Although immunization is a public priority, vaccine coverage among adult Americans is inadequate. The Institute of Medicine, the Community Preventive Services Task Force, and other public health entities have called for the developmen...

BACKGROUND Although older adults are encouraged by government agencies to receive influenza vaccinations, many do not obtain them. In Taiwan, where universal health care coverage has significantly reduced the barriers of access to care, the health care system has provided free influenza vaccinations for people 65 years or older since 2001. Nevertheless, the numbers of people who use this servic...

BACKGROUND In Germany, the coverage of officially recommended vaccinations for the elderly is below a desirable level. It is known that advice provided by General Practitioners and Physician Assistants influences the uptake in patients ≥60 years. Therefore, the predictors of advice-giving behavior by these professions should be investigated to develop recommendations for possible actions for im...

INTRODUCTION Prophylactic vaccinations play a significant role in health care. As a relatively cost-effective preventive measure they can help to avert transmissible diseases and thus protect not only the vaccinated individuals themselves but also those who have not been vaccinated. In order to achieve this, a high vaccination rate is necessary; for many prophylactic vaccinations this rate is n...

We formulate and discuss models for the spread of infectious diseases with variable population sizes and vaccinations on the susceptible individuals. First, we assume that the susceptible individuals are vaccinated continuously. We establish the threshold-like results for the existence and global stability of the disease-free and the endemic equilibriums for these systems. Especially, we prove ...

BACKGROUND Medical homes are health care settings that offer continuous, comprehensive, accessible primary care; these settings generally involve pediatric and family physician practices or community health centers but can also involve gynecologists or internists. OBJECTIVES In this article, we review available evidence on the role of the medical home in optimizing adolescent immunization del...

We investigate stochastic extinction in an epidemic model and the impact of random vaccinations in large populations formulated in terms of an optimal escape path. We find that different random vaccination strategies can have widely different results in decreasing expected time till extinction, for the same total amount of vaccines used. Vaccination strategies are considered in terms of two par...