CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Pertussisis an acute vaccine-preventable respiratory disease that remains a publichealth problem. In an attempt to improve the control of the disease, manycountries have incorporated new boosters in their vaccination schedule. Sincethe incorporation of these boosters is relatively recent, there are not enoughdata about their impact to support and/or universalize their use. Alternativestrategies such as the improvement in vaccine coverage and reduction invaccination delays, in addition to the incorporation of boosters, could beimplemented. Though these strategies are not new, they have not been adequatelyevaluated in order to be implemented and/or prioritized. To evaluate thepotential impact of these alternative strategies on pertussis incidence, wedeveloped a methodology that involves the use of datacollected from vaccination centers and an age-structured deterministic mathematicalmodel for pertussis transmission. The results obtained show that strategiesthat avoid delays in vaccination have a strong impact on incidence reduction inthe most vulnerable population (infants less than 1y). In regions with high vaccinationcoverage (95%) the elimination of delays in the three primary doses decreasespertussis incidence in infants by approximately 20%. In regions where delays inthe administration of vaccines are higher, the combined action to reduce delaysand improve coverage leads to a significant improvement in disease control ininfants. By repeating the calculations using different sets of parameters thatdescribe different possible epidemiologic scenarios, we determined therobustness of our results. All the results presented highlight theimportance of having high vaccine coverage and shorter delays in vaccine administrationin order to reduce the impact of the disease in infants

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