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Influenza Vaccination Paper

Decent Essays

Influenza remains as a significant global threat to public health. In United States alone, a typical influenza epidemic results in over 25 million infections, 300,000 hospitalizations and 13,000 deaths every year (1). The virus evolves antigenically from one year to the next, requiring annual reformulation of the vaccine and leading to variable vaccine efficacy. Exacerbating this natural antigenic evolution, adaptation to the chicken eggs may occur during the manufacture of virus used to produce the inactivated vaccine (2). This year such adaptation has reduced the vaccine efficacy against H3N2 strain (3). Low vaccine efficacy is expected to generate higher attack rates, as has already occured in Australia (3, 4). Compounding the effects of low vaccine efficacy, public perception following the widespread media attention may depress vaccine uptake for a given year. The combination of low vaccine efficacy and low coverage has the potential to reduce herd immunity, putting the population at risk of elevated infection incidence and ultimately high rates of infections and mortality. Consequently, optimizing epidemiological effectiveness of vaccination given vaccine efficacy is imperative to minimize the annual mortality and morbidity of influenza. …show more content…

Vaccination coverage in the US has however substantially differed among different age-groups, and has been suboptimal for young- and middle-aged adults (6). Decisions on vaccination distribution policy, like any other public health decision, is often made using imperfect data from limited randomized, controlled trial studies (7). Mathematical models can provide essential evaluations of optimal vaccination policy, which is difficult to achieve through field

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