Smallpox outbreak response: Targeted vaccination may be almost as effective as mass v...( ccurred and no immunity from earlier v...),Health

If 80 percent of the people in close contact with identified smallpox cases were vaccinated (targeted vaccination), there would be 19.6 deaths out of every thousand without preexisting immunity. With such immunity, however, the death rates dropped to 1.8 per thousand, the authors report.

Each death rate was lowest in scenarios where the vaccinations took place right after the first smallpox case occurred, and increased the longer the vaccinations were delayed.

"For all strategies, rapid response can make the difference between preventing versus merely containing an epidemic," the authors write in their Science study.

A related commentary by Jim Koopman of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor accompanies the Science report.

The other authors of the study are Azhar Nizam, and Yang Yang of the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University. The research was partially funded by the Fogarty International Center and the National Institutes of Health.

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American Association for the Advancement of Science
14-Nov-2002