Prevention of influenza in healthy children

Abstract

Healthy children are high transmitters of influenza and can experience poor influenza outcomes. Many questions remain about the efficacy and impect of preventive measures because most existing studies report imprecise proxies of influenza incidence, do not follow subjects throughout the entire influenza season and across multiple influenza seasons, or do not control for important factors such as timing of implementation and social contact patterns. Modeling and simulation are key methodologies to answer questions regarding influenza prevention. While vaccination may be the most efficacious existing intervention, variations in circulating strains and children’s immune systems keep current vaccines from being fully protective, necessitating further clinical and economic studies and technology improvements. Hand hygiene appears to be an important adjunct but improving compliance, standardizing regimens and quantifying its impact remain challenging. Future studies should help better define the specific indications and circumstances for antiviral use and the role of nutritional supplements and nonpharmaceutical interventions.

Evolution of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic: A global health emergency

“…Humidification of indoor air to maintain humidity to 40-60% relative humidity at room temperature (Lester, 1948;Lowen and Palese, 2009;Lowen et al, 2007;Reiman et al, 2018;Yang et al, 2012) Ventilation of indoor air (Schulman and Kilbourne, 1962) Wearing face mask to keep the nose warm and moist (Foxman et al, 2015;Foxman et al, 2016;Kudo et al, 2019;Williams et al, 1996) Vitamin D supplement to compensate for short daylight-induced Vitamin D deficiency (Abu-Amer and Bar-Shavit, 1993;Lee and Shah, 2012;Rondanelli et al, 2018;Yellon et al, 1999) Sleeping N7 h/day (Besedovsky et al, 2019) Washing hands to prevent indirect contact transmission (Lee and Shah, 2012;Warren-Gash et al, 2013) report a case of COVID-19: Comoros, Lesotho, and São Tomé and Príncipe. There have been no reported cases in the territory of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha.…”

Prevalence of antibodies against influenza A and B viruses in children in Germany, 2008 to 2010

“…As demonstrated in several randomised clinical trials, intranasal live attenuated influenza vaccine has higher efficacy than the standard inactivated split vaccine and may improve vaccination in children [11,12]. However, owing to variations in circulating virus strains and in children's immune systems, current influenza vaccines are not fully protective [13]. Immunologically naïve younger children may be at increased risk of severe influenza disease and will therefore benefit from vaccination more than older children who have already had one or more influenza virus infections.…”

The Potential Health Care Costs And Resource Use Associated With COVID-19 In The United States

“…All of this calls for an urgent need to better understand the potential health care costs and demand for resources due to COVID-19 in the U.S. when different percentages of the population become infected. Computational models have helped quantify the potential impact of and guide decision making for epidemics and outbreaks in the past, such as the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] the ongoing Ebola outbreak that emerged in 2018, 17 and the 2015-2016 Zika outbreak. 18,19 Therefore, we developed a computational model to represent what may happen to each patient infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV2) and quantify potential resource use and direct medical costs (i.e., costs directly attributable to health care resource use for interventions and care that are specific to COVID-19 illness and would typically be paid out by third-party payers) in the U.S. under various conditions.…”