Seroepidemiology: an underused tool for designing and monitoring vaccination programmes in low ‐ and middle‐income countries

Summary Seroepidemiology, the use of data on the prevalence of bio‐markers of infection or vaccination, is a potentially powerful tool to understand the epidemiology of infection before vaccination and to monitor the effectiveness of vaccination programmes. Global and national burden of disease estimates for hepatitis B and rubella are based almost exclusively on serological data. Seroepidemiology has helped in the design of measles, poliomyelitis and rubella elimination programmes, by informing estimates of the required population immunity thresholds for elimination. It contributes to monitoring of these programmes by identifying population immunity gaps and evaluating the effectiveness of vaccination campaigns. Seroepidemiological data have also helped to identify contributing factors to resurgences of diphtheria, Haemophilus Influenzae type B and pertussis. When there is no confounding by antibodies induced by natural infection (as is the case for tetanus and hepatitis B vaccines), seroprevalence data provide a composite picture of vaccination coverage and effectiveness, although they cannot reliably indicate the number of doses of vaccine received. Despite these potential uses, technological, time and cost constraints have limited the widespread application of this tool in low‐income countries. The use of venous blood samples makes it difficult to obtain high participation rates in surveys, but the performance of assays based on less invasive samples such as dried blo...
Source: Tropical Medicine and International Health - Category: Tropical Medicine Authors: Tags: Review Source Type: research