Workshop report: Nucleic acid delivery devices for HIV vaccines: Workshop proceedings, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Bethesda, Maryland, USA, May 21, 2015.

On May 21st, 2015, the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) convened a workshop on delivery devices for nucleic acid (NA) as vaccines in order to review the landscape of past and future technologies for administering NA (e.

Safety, tolerability, and immunogenicity of inactivated trivalent seasonal influenza vaccine administered with a needle-free disposable-syringe jet injector.

Background: Jet injectors (JIs) avoid safety drawbacks of needle-syringe (N-S) while generating similar immune responses. A new generation of disposable-syringe jet injectors (DSJIs) overcomes the cross-contamination risk of multi-use-nozzle devices used in 20th-century campaigns. In the first study in humans, the newly-US-licensed LectraJet(®) model M3 RA DSJI was compared to N-S.

Epidemiology of needlesticks and other sharps injuries and injection safety practices in the Dominican Republic.

Background: Contaminated sharps, such as needles, lancets, scalpels, broken glass, specimen tubes, and other instruments, can transmit bloodborne pathogens such as HIV, hepatitis B (HBV), and hepatitis C viruses (HCV).

Methods: Observation of facilities and injections and questionnaire-guided interviews were conducted in 2005 among health care workers (HCWs) in 2 public hospitals in Santo Domingo and 136 public immunization clinics (IC) in the Dominican Republic. Injection practices and sharps injuries (SIs) in health care facilities in the Dominican Republic were assessed in cross-sectional surveys to identify areas in which preventive efforts might be directed to make injection practices safer.

Designing pediatric vaccine formularies and pricing pediatric combination vaccines using operations research models and algorithms.

The National Immunization Program, housed within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the USA, has identified several challenges that must be faced in childhood immunization programs to deliver and procure vaccines that immunize children from the plethora of childhood diseases. The biomedical issues cited include how drug manufacturers can combine and formulate vaccines, how such vaccines are scheduled and administered and how economically sound vaccine procurement can be achieved. This review discusses how operations research models can be used to address the economics of pediatric vaccine formulary design and pricing, as well as how such models can be used to address a new set of pediatric formulary problems that will surface with the introduction of pediatric combination vaccines into the US pediatric immunization market.

Model-based estimates of risks of disease transmission and economic costs of seven injection devices in sub-Saharan Africa.

Objective: To investigate and compare seven types of injection devices for their risks of iatrogenic transmission of bloodborne pathogens and their economic costs in sub-Saharan Africa.

Methods: Risk assumptions for each device and cost models were constructed to estimate the number of new hepatitis B virus (HBV) and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections resulting from patient-to-patient, patient-to-health care worker, and patient-to-community transmission. Costs of device purchase and usage were derived from the literature, while costs of direct medical care and lost productivity from HBV and HIV disease were based on data collected in 1999 in Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, and Uganda.

General recommendations on immunization. Recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP).

This report is a revision of General Recommendations on Immunization and updates the 1994 statement by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) (CDC. General recommendations on immunization: recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices [ACIP]. MMWR 1994;43[No.

Frequency and causes of vaccine wastage.

Unlabelled: Assessing the frequency of vaccine wastage and the relative magnitude of its various causes may help to target efforts to reduce these losses and to husband funds for increasingly expensive vaccines.

Methods: As a preliminary overview of wastage in the United States, 64 public-sector state and local health department immunization programs were polled in 1998 and 1999 for wastage recording practices. Actual wastage data were collected from a non-random subset of five states.