Resolving pertussis immunity and vaccine effectiveness using incidence time series

Abstract

Resolving the long-term, population-level consequence of vaccine-induced immunity to pertussis is a key challenge for control strategies and vaccine development. Controlled vaccine efficacy studies provide invaluable information; however, they are limited in scope by their sample size and follow-up duration. Long-term time series of incidence data collected by public health institutions provide insight at a broader scale, especially when the data are spatially explicit and age stratified. By using modern ecological and statistical methodolgies, which are reviewed in this paper, new insights into the duration of transmission-blocking immunity and the age-specific patterns of transmission can be gained. Recent advances in computing power and statistical software development will increasingly make these methods available to public health practitioners, vaccine developers and academics alike.

Keywords::

• age-stratified incidence
• disease ecology
• dynamical signature
• likelihood
• mathematical model
• reporting efficiency
• statistical inference
• time-series data
• transmission
• whooping cough

Acknowledgements

The authors thank A King for comments.

Financial & competing interests disclosure

JS Lavine and P Rohani were supported by the Research and Policy for Infectious Disease Dynamics program of the Science and Technology Directorate, Department of Homeland Security, and the Fogarty International Center, NIH. P Rohani was also supported by the Vaccine Modeling Initiative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and by a grant from the NIH (1R01AI101155). The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.