The Contribution of Residents Who Cooperate With Ring-Vaccination Measures Against Smallpox Epidemic

Abstract

<jats:title>ABSTRACT</jats:title><jats:p><jats:bold>Objectives:</jats:bold> Establishing containment measures against the potential spread of the smallpox virus has become a major issue in the public health field since the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States. The primary objective of the study was to investigate the relationship between the level of activity of public health agencies and the voluntary cooperation of residents with ring-vaccination measures against a smallpox epidemic.</jats:p><jats:p><jats:bold>Methods:</jats:bold> A discrete-time, stochastic, individual-based model was used to simulate the spread of a smallpox epidemic that has become a more pressing topic due to 9/11 and to assess the effectiveness of and required resources for ring-vaccination measures in a closed community. In the simulation, we related sensitive tracing to the level of activity of the public health agency and strict isolation to the level of voluntary cooperation from residents.</jats:p><jats:p><jats:bold>Results:</jats:bold> Our results suggest that early and intensive case detection and contact tracing by public health agencies can reduce the scale of an epidemic and use fewer total resources. In contrast, voluntary reporting by the traced contacts of symptom onset after vaccination had little impact on the scale of epidemic in our model. However, it reduced the total required resources, indicating that citizens' voluntary cooperation would contribute to reducing the burden on public health agencies.</jats:p><jats:p><jats:bold>Conclusions:</jats:bold> We conclude that a combined effort on the part of public health agencies and residents in performing containment measures is essential to quickly ending a smallpox epidemic.</jats:p><jats:p>(<jats:italic>Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness</jats:italic>. 2012;6:270–276)</jats:p>

Modelling of optimal vaccination strategies in response to a bioterrorism associated smallpox outbreak

“…16 Several studies have compared ring and mass vaccination strategies and possible benefits of prior levels of herd immunity combined with control measures. [17][18][19][20][21][22] Some studies favor isolation of infected individuals and ring vaccination as the optimal strategy provided there are no resource constraints. 17,19 In the presence of a large number of cases or higher reproduction number, mass vaccination may be a preferred option of outbreak control.…”

Emergency supply chain management for controlling infectious disease outbreaks

“…Comparisons between ring and mass vaccination campaigns form the main objective in several studies (Halloran, Longini Jr et al 2002;Kaplan, Craft et al 2002;Kaplan, Craft et al 2003;Eidelson and Lustick 2004;Eubank, Guclu et al 2004;Porco, Holbrook et al 2004;Ohkusa, Taniguchi et al 2005;Hall, Egan et al 2007;House, Hall et al 2009;Egan, Hall et al 2011). Other studies consider quarantine options (Barbera, Macintyre et al 2001) Halloran et al 2007;Glasser, Foster et al 2008;Zenihana and Ishikawa 2010;Sato and Sakurai 2012;Finin, Kosaraju et al 2013;Mizumoto, Ejima et al 2013), and, finally, the possible benefits of prior levels of herd immunity combined with control measures (Nishiura and Tang 2004). In order to assess the possible benefits of control measures, several scenarios are built based on reasonable ranges of parameters like the number of initial cases infected, levels of residual herd immunity, delays for implementing containment strategies, relevant efficiency of control measures etc.…”