Measles: Correlation of Vaccine Uptake with Disease Rates

The following is a country-by-country analysis of measles reporting trends vs. vaccine uptake.  For purposes of consistency, incidence data and population statistics used to calculate rates per 100,000 will be limited to those published by the World Health Organization (WHO).  Resultant graphs were generated by Gideon and abstracted from the Gideon e-book series [1,2]  True estimates of vaccination update statistics are those published by WHO, in most cases available only since 1980.  Data published by the countries themselves were not used, to avoid possible bias or inconsistency when comparing data among countries. Historical disease data which precede 1980 have also been appended to graphs to further appreciate the impact of vaccination. The reader will note that in virtually all cases, the presumed impact of vaccine uptake on disease incidence occurs when vaccine uptake exceeds 80%, and again when rates increase beyond 90%.   As such, the few countries which have not achieved 80% uptake, or have consistently reported >90% uptake since 1980 are excluded.  Graphs are not included for countries for which data are not reported, or reported only sporadically. Individual graphs for 135 countries are presented below in alphabetical order.  In 127 (94%) of these, a clear relationship seems to exist between increasing vaccine uptake and decreasing rates of measles.  In eight cases, temporary “spikes” in disease incidence were reported during years of high v...
Source: GIDEON blog - Category: Databases & Libraries Authors: Tags: Ebooks Epidemiology Graphs Outbreaks ProMED Source Type: blogs