This chapter assesses the expansion of mass immunization in China during the calamitous period from 1945 to 1949. The reestablishment of biological research and production bases in the newly ...repossessed eastern cities solidified the authority of Chinese immunologists such as Tang Feifan, Wei Xi, Xie Shaowen, and others as prominent contributors to Chinese public health. At the same time, as the capacities of state administrations were stretched and strained, new dialogues emerged over the role of coercive immunization, its relationship to legitimate governance, and the ability of microbiology to contribute to national reconstruction. Medical researchers and clinicians especially championed one vaccine at this time: the BCG immunization against tuberculosis. The immunization itself proved difficult to produce and implement, but its promotion reflected the changes that the war with Japan had wrought in China's public health system and its adoption of mass immunization programs. Nationalists and Communists alike embraced the vaccines that these researchers developed and manufactured. The chapter then looks at vaccination policies and practices during the Chinese Civil War.
This paper considers the problem of controlling a childhood epidemic described by a susceptible-infective-recovered (SIR) model. The epidemic has a chaotic behavior, with large outbreaks entailing ...considerable costs. The control problem is set up to perform a chaos reduction, namely to yield a beneficial compression of the outbreaks of infectives. A simple class of vaccination policies is considered with this aim.
Congenital rubella syndrome occurred in a boy born to a mother who had been properly vaccinated three times before conception, but developed only low titers of rubella antibody. The non-vaccinated ...father most likely infected the mother on a home visit during the third to fifth weeks of gestation. He served in the army and fell ill during an outbreak of a rubella-like disease in his military unit. The mother subsequently developed a slight rash, but rubella IgM antibodies were lacking and rubella infection was not suspected. This incidence demonstrates the necessity of vaccinating all children, including boys and young men, in order to reduce the number of infections and prevent further cases of congenital rubella syndrome.
Despite nearly a century of use, Bacille Calmette-Gue´rin (BCG) remains controversial, with known variations in BCG substrains, vaccine efficacy, policies, and practices across the world. Global ...information on BCG policies and practices may be useful for clinical interpretation of diagnostic tests as well as in the design of novel TB vaccines that are under development. URL:http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1001012.
This paper is concerned with a Sevast’yanov age-dependent branching process, describing outbreaks of an infectious disease with incubation period. The main goal was to define the optimal proportion ...of susceptible individuals that has to be vaccinated in order to eliminate the disease. To this end we study the properties of the time to extinction of an infection according to the proportion of immune individuals in the population. The results lead us to suggest a vaccination policy based on the mean of the infection survival time. Finally, we provide a simulation-based method to determine the optimal vaccination level, and as an illustration analyze the data of outbreaks of avian influenza spreading in Vietnam at the end of 2006.
