Routine use of typhoid conjugate vaccine could prevent millions of cases
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Routine use of a typhoid conjugate vaccine with a catch-up campaign through age 15 years could prevent approximately 67 million cases and 826,000 deaths caused by typhoid fever over 10 years, according to a study.
WHO prequalified the first typhoid conjugate vaccine in 2018, making it accessible in areas where it is most needed, and recent evidence demonstrated its effectiveness even as Salmonella Typhi increasingly develops resistance.
“Drug resistance is a major problem for typhoid fever,” Virginia E. Pitzer, ScD, associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, told Healio.
Pitzer said recently developed typhoid conjugate vaccines (TCVs) “have the potential to prevent drug-resistant typhoid fever and have been recommended by the WHO for introduction into routine immunization schedule in countries with a high incidence of typhoid fever and/or a high prevalence of drug resistance.”
“We previously analyzed the cost-effectiveness of vaccination strategies in countries eligible for GAVI support,” Pitzer said. “Here, we wanted to further emphasize the potential value of TCV introduction by estimating how many cases of drug-resistant typhoid could be prevented.”
Pitzer and colleagues predicted the burden of antimicrobial-resistant typhoid fever in 73 lower-income countries by combining output from mathematical models of typhoid transmission with estimates of antimicrobial resistance from meta-analyses. They based the effect of vaccination on forecasts of vaccine coverage.
The study showed that the introduction of routine immunization with TCV at 9 months with a catch-up campaign going up to age 15 years of age could prevent approximately two out of every three cases of drug-resistant typhoid fever and prevent approximately 67 million cases and 826,000 deaths in the 73 countries over 10 years.
Additionally, vaccination was predicted to reduce the relative prevalence of antimicrobial-resistant typhoid fever by 16% (95% prediction interval, 0-49) over 10 years following introduction.
“Vaccines have enormous potential to tackle the emergence of drug resistance by preventing people from being infected with drug-resistant strains,” Pitzer said.
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts