Modeling rates of infection with transient maternal antibodies and waning active immunity: application to Bordetella pertussis in Sweden.

Serological surveys provide reliable information from which to calculate forces (instantaneous rates) of infection, but waning immunity and clinical consequences that depend on residual immunity complicate interpretation of results. We devised a means of calculating these rates that accounts for passively acquired maternal antibodies that decay or active immunity that wanes, permitting re-infection. We applied our method to pertussis (whooping cough) in Sweden, where vaccination was discontinued from 1979 to 1995. A national cross-sectional serosurvey of antibodies to pertussis toxin, which peak soon after infection and then decay, was conducted shortly after vaccination resumed. Together with age-specific contact rates in Finland, contemporary forces of infection enable us to evaluate the recent assertion that the probability of infection upon contact is age-independent. We find elevated probabilities among children, adolescents and young adults, whose contacts may be more intimate than others. Products of contact rates and probabilities of infection permit transmission modeling and estimation of the intrinsic reproduction number. In contrast to another recent estimate, ours approximates the ratio of life expectancy and age at first infection. Our framework is sufficiently general to accommodate more realistic sojourn distributions and additional lifetime infections.

Autism and thimerosal-containing vaccines: lack of consistent evidence for an association.

BACKGROUND: In 1999, concerns were raised that vaccines containing the preservative Thimerosal might increase the risk of autism and/or other neurodevelopmental disorders. METHODS: Between the mid-1980s through the late-1990s, we compared the prevalence/incidence of autism in California, Sweden, and Denmark with average exposures to Thimerosal-containing vaccines. Graphic ecologic analyses were used to examine population-based data from the United States (national immunization coverage surveys and counts of children diagnosed with autism-like disorders seeking special education services in California); Sweden (national inpatient data on autism cases, national vaccination coverage levels, and information on use of all vaccines and vaccine-specific amounts of Thimerosal); and Denmark (national registry of inpatient/outpatient-diagnosed autism cases, national vaccination coverage levels, and information on use of all vaccines and vaccine-specific amounts of Thimerosal). RESULTS: In all three countries, the incidence and prevalence of autism-like disorders began to rise in the 1985-1989 period, and the rate of increase accelerated in the early 1990s. However, in contrast to the situation in the United States, where the average Thimerosal dose from vaccines increased throughout the 1990s, Thimerosal exposures from vaccines in both Sweden and Denmark-already low throughout the 1970s and 1980s-began to decrease in the late 1980s and were eliminated in the early 1990s. CONCLUSIONS: The body of existing data, including the ecologic data presented herein, is not consistent with the hypothesis that increased exposure to Thimerosal-containing vaccines is responsible for the apparent increase in the rates of autism in young children being observed worldwide.

Evaluation of targeted influenza vaccination strategies via population modeling.

BACKGROUND: Because they can generate comparable predictions, mathematical models are ideal tools for evaluating alternative drug or vaccine allocation strategies. To remain credible, however, results must be consistent. Authors of a recent assessment of possible influenza vaccination strategies conclude that older children, adolescents, and young adults are the optimal targets, no matter the objective, and argue for vaccinating them. Authors of two earlier studies concluded, respectively, that optimal targets depend on objectives and cautioned against changing policy. Which should we believe? METHODS AND FINDINGS: In matrices whose elements are contacts between persons by age, the main diagonal always predominates, reflecting contacts between contemporaries. Indirect effects (e.g., impacts of vaccinating one group on morbidity or mortality in others) result from off-diagonal elements. Mixing matrices based on periods in proximity with others have greater sub- and super-diagonals, reflecting contacts between parents and children, and other off-diagonal elements (reflecting, e.g., age-independent contacts among co-workers), than those based on face-to-face conversations. To assess the impact of targeted vaccination, we used a time-usage study's mixing matrix and allowed vaccine efficacy to vary with age. And we derived mortality rates either by dividing observed deaths attributed to pneumonia and influenza by average annual cases from a demographically-realistic SEIRS model or by multiplying those rates by ratios of (versus adding to them differences between) pandemic and pre-pandemic mortalities. CONCLUSIONS: In our simulations, vaccinating older children, adolescents, and young adults averts the most cases, but vaccinating either younger children and older adults or young adults averts the most deaths, depending on the age distribution of mortality. These results are consistent with those of the earlier studies.