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New vaccination research
October 29, 1999A team of ecologists has shown that mass vaccination programmes can sometimes produce unexpected results - which could lead to new thinking on how such programmes are carried out.
New research published today in Science focuses on the effect of immunisation programmes on the location and timing of measles and whooping cough epidemics.
Mass vaccinations started for measles in 1968 and the team found that, before that date epidemics tended to flare up regularly every two years.
But after vaccination programmes were introduced there were fewer outbreaks of disease and these occurred at irregular intervals.
Dr Bryan Grenfell, of the Department of Zoology, said:
"Vaccination reduced the number of cases of measles and that meant that the time needed for enough previously uninfected children be susceptible to the disease for a new epidemic to break out was lengthened to about two-and-half years.
This produced more irregular epidemics, which were no longer occurring in synchrony across the two countries."
But when whooping cough epidemics were put under the spotlight, the patterns were completely reversed.
Before vaccination, the epidemics in different cities did not occur at the same time and each behaved differently. But after the start of vaccination, in 1957, the epidemics become regular and synchronised.
Dr Grenfell said:
"Whooping cough is infectious for longer, so epidemics before vaccination are more spread out. Vaccination slows the epidemics down so much that they lock into a four-year cycle, which the initial 'shock' of vaccination lines up.
Our research shows that vaccinations can do unexpected things and learning about how predictable these epidemics are could have important implications for controlling infection."
The next step for the research team will be to understand how the two infections spread geographically, by looking at more detailed models of up to 1,000 different cities, towns and villages.
Cambridge, University of
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