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Review
. 2016 May;15(5):641-58.
doi: 10.1586/14760584.2016.1130628. Epub 2016 Mar 4.

Routinely vaccinating adolescents against meningococcus: targeting transmission & disease

Volker Vetter  1 , Roger Baxter  2 , Gülhan Denizer  1 , Marco A P Sáfadi  3 , Sven-Arne Silfverdal  4 , Andrew Vyse  1 , Ray Borrow  5
Affiliations
Review

Routinely vaccinating adolescents against meningococcus: targeting transmission & disease

Volker Vetter et al. Expert Rev Vaccines. 2016 May.

Abstract

Adolescents have the highest rates of meningococcal carriage and transmission. Interrupting the adolescent habitat in order to reduce carriage and transmission within adolescents and to other age groups could help to control meningococcal disease at a population level. Compared to immunization strategies restricted to young children, a strategy focused on adolescents may have more profound and long-lasting indirect impacts, and may be more cost effective. Despite challenges in reaching this age-group, experience with other vaccines show that high vaccine coverage of adolescents is attainable.

Keywords: Neisseria meningitidis; adolescent; carriage; cost-effectiveness; epidemiology; herd protection; transmission; vaccine.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Simplified illustration of the pivotal role of adolescents in the epidemiology of meningococcal disease compared to other pathogens that also cause invasive disease [25,28,31,32,42,43].
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Evidence of herd protection in countries which implemented a large catch-up campaign (the Netherlands [44] and the United Kingdom [46]) after the onset of meningococcal serogroup C conjugate vaccination programs.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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