Objective. Vaccinations are the most important tool to prevent infectious diseases. Chemotherapy-induced immune depression may impact the efficacy of vaccinations in children. Patients and Methods. A panel of experts of the supportive care working group of the Italian Association Paediatric Haematology Oncology (AIEOP) addressed this issue by guidelines on vaccinations in paediatric cancer patients. The literature published between 1980 and 2013 was reviewed. Results and Conclusion. During intensive chemotherapy, vaccination turned out to be effective for hepatitis A and B, whilst vaccinations with toxoid, protein subunits, or bacterial antigens should be postponed to the less intensive phases, to achieve an adequate immune response. Apart from varicella, the administration of live-attenuated-virus vaccines is not recommended during this phase. Family members should remain on recommended vaccination schedules, including toxoid, inactivated vaccine (also poliomyelitis), and live-attenuated vaccines (varicella, measles, mumps, and rubella). By the time of completion of chemotherapy, insufficient serum antibody levels for vaccine-preventable diseases have been reported, while immunological memory appears to be preserved. Once immunological recovery is completed, usually after 6 months, response to booster or vaccination is generally good and allows patients to be protected and also to contribute to herd immunity.

The asymptotic convergence of nonlinear switched systems in the presence of disturbances is studied in this paper. The system switches among a family of integral input-testate stable systems. The time between two consecutive switchings is not less than a value m. This dwell-time TD is allowed to take different values according to a function whose argument is the state of the system at the switching times. We propose a dwelltime function which depends on the comparison functions which characterize the integral input-testate stability and guarantees the state of the switched system to converge to zero under the action of disturbances with "bounded energy". The main feature of the analysis is that it does not rely on the property that the switching stops in finite time. The two important cases of locally exponentially stable and feedforward systems are analyzed in detail.A successful strategy to deal with a largely uncertain system, whose model is unknown but belongs to one of many families of nominal (and known) models, is to design a controller for each family of possible models, and then let a supervision logic decide from time to time what is the better controller to place in the feedback loop. This control strategy is typically known as switching or logic-based or supervisory control ([14], [E], [16], [12], 171, [lo], [SI, [ll]). The study of a logicbased supervisory control system usually boils down to the analysis of the "convergence" properties' of a switched system, which depends on the piecewise constant switching signal U generated by the supervision ''Convergence to zero of (nonlinear timevarying) systems with disturbances is a fundamental issue which arises not only in (switching) adaptive control, but a150 in many other control problems. See [ZO] for other results in this regard. 0-7803-7516-5/02/$17.00 02002 IEEE

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In children with cancer, aggressive antineoplastic treatment, severe and longlasting neutropenia and lymphocytopenia are associated with fungal infections. These features as the clinical pictures are similar to those reported in adults, but in children, the overall and the infection-specific (fungemia or mycosis with deep tissue infection) mortalities are lower.