Meningococcal conjugate vaccines have several advantages over polysaccharide vaccines, including the ability to induce greater antibody persistence, avidity, immunologic memory, and herd immunity. Since 1999, meningococcal conjugate vaccine programs have been established across the globe. Many of these vaccination programs have resulted in significant decline in meningococcal disease in several...

The Zika virus has emerged as a global public health concern. Its rapid geographic expansion is attributed to the success of Aedes mosquito vectors, but local epidemiological drivers are still poorly understood. Feira de Santana played a pivotal role in the Chikungunya epidemic in Brazil and was one of the first urban centres to report Zika infections. Using a climate-driven transmission model ...

High immunization coverage rates are desirable in order to reduce total morbidity and mortality rates, but it may also provide an incentive for herd immunity free riding strategies. The aim of this paper was to investigate the link between cognitive ability and vaccination intention in a hypothetical scenario experiment about Avian Flu immunization. A between-subject scenario experiment was uti...

Major epidemics of measles are again in the news across the UK because of our failure to maintain population herd immunity. This situation has occurred primarily because of a loss of public confidence in the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, which was never restored following the Wakefield debacle, and a lack of awareness of the potential morbidity and mortality associated with measles....

We developed a stochastic susceptible-exposed-infectious-removed (SEIR) model to simulate a range of plausible morbillivirus outbreak scenarios in a randomly mixing population of 170 endangered Hawaiian monk seals (Neomonachus schauinslandi). We then modeled realistic vaccination and quarantine measures to determine the potential efficacy of such mitigation efforts. Morbillivirus outbreaks repr...

INTRODUCTION The seroprevalence study was performed in Vojvodina during May and June 2010 in order to asses the effects of the 2009 pandemic influenza A(H1N1)v epidemic on herd immunity. It was a part of the Serbian Ministry of Health funded nationwide study. OBJECTIVE Prevalence of antibodies against 2009 pandemic influenza A(H1N1)v was determined in a 1% sample of the population monitored f...

Incidence of whooping cough, unlike many other childhood diseases for which there is an efficacious vaccine, has been increasing over the past twenty years despite high levels of vaccine coverage. Its reemergence has been particularly noticeable among teenagers and adults. Many hypotheses have been put forward to explain these two patterns, but parsimonious reconciliation of clinical data on th...

This minireview summarizes the historical development of bacterial population genetic concepts since the early 1980s. Initially multilocus enzyme electrophoresis was used to determine population structures but this technique is poorly portable between laboratories and was replaced in 1998 by multilocus sequence typing. Diverse population structures exist in different bacterial species. Two dist...

Meningococcal strains isolated during an outbreak were shown to belong to the ET-5 complex and to harbor a mutation in the VR2 region of the porA gene. They were less susceptible to the bactericidal effect of normal human serum than was the ET-5 wild-type strain. These results are of concern, as PorA is a potential target in vaccine design.

The Human papillomaviruses (HPV) vaccine induces a herd immunity effect in genital warts when a large number of the population is vaccinated. This aspect should be taken into account when devising new vaccine strategies, like vaccination at older ages or male vaccination. Therefore, it is important to develop mathematical models with good predictive capacities. We devised a sexual contact netwo...