Modelling pertussis transmission to evaluate the effectiveness of an adolescent booster in Argentina

Due to the current epidemiological situation of pertussis, several countries have implemented vaccination strategies that include a booster dose for adolescents. Since there is still no evidence showing that the adolescent booster has a positive effect on the most vulnerable group represented by inf...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Fabricius, Gabriel, Bergero, Paula Elena, Ormazabal, Maximiliano Emanuel, Maltz, Alberto, Hozbor, Daniela Flavia
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2012
Country:Argentina
Institution:Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
Repository:CONICET Digital (CONICET)
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:ri.conicet.gov.ar:11336/5335
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/11336/5335
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Epidemic
Mathematical Modelling
Pertussis
Tdap Booster
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/1.1
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/1
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/3.3
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/3
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/1.6
Description
Summary:Due to the current epidemiological situation of pertussis, several countries have implemented vaccination strategies that include a booster dose for adolescents. Since there is still no evidence showing that the adolescent booster has a positive effect on the most vulnerable group represented by infants, it is difficult to universalize the recommendation to include such reinforcement. In this work we present an age-structured compartmental deterministic model that considers the outstanding epidemiological features of the disease in order to assess the impact of the booster dose at age 11 years (Tdap booster) to infants. To this end, we performed different parameterizations of the model that represent distinct possible epidemiological scenarios. The results obtained show that the inclusion of a single Tdap dose at age 11 years significantly reduces the incidence of the disease within this age group, but has a very low impact on the risk group (0-1 year). An effort to improve the coverage of the first dose would have a much greater impact on infants. These results hold in the 18 scenarios considered, which demonstrates the robustness of these conclusions.