Publications by authors named "I Longini"
Background: At the beginning of the 2018-2020 outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD) in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), no vaccine had been licensed. However, cluster-randomized evidence from Guinea in 2015 had indicated that ring vaccination around new cases (targeting contacts and contacts-of-contacts) with the use of single-dose live-replicating rVSV-ZEBOV-GP vaccine reduced EVD rates starting 10 days after vaccination. Thus, ring vaccination was added to the standard control measures for that outbreak.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe TIRS trial: Enrollment procedures and baseline characterization of a pediatric cohort to quantify the epidemiologic impact of targeted indoor residual spraying on Aedes-borne viruses in Merida, Mexico.
PLoS One
September 2024
Aedes mosquito-borne viruses (ABVs) place a substantial strain on public health resources in the Americas. Vector control of Aedes mosquitoes is an important public health strategy to decrease or prevent spread of ABVs. The ongoing Targeted Indoor Residual Spraying (TIRS) trial is an NIH-sponsored clinical trial to study the efficacy of a novel, proactive vector control technique to prevent dengue virus (DENV), Zika virus (ZIKV), and chikungunya virus (CHIKV) infections in the endemic city of Merida, Yucatan, Mexico.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe used published data from outbreak investigations of monkeypox virus clade I in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to estimate the distributions of critical epidemiological parameters. We estimated a mean incubation period of 9.9 days (95% credible interval [CrI] 8.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- The test-negative design (TND) is an observational method for evaluating vaccine effectiveness by enrolling individuals who are tested for a disease, comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated patients based on their test results.
- TND differs from traditional case-control studies because it does not pre-specify the ratio of positive to negative test results, and both designs may face issues with sparse data when vaccines are highly effective.
- Simulation studies reveal that while different statistical tests can be used, the score test outperforms others in analyzing TND and case-control data; the authors recommend a score-based approach and suggest modifying sample size calculations for TND studies to better address variability.
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic drove a widespread, often uncoordinated effort by research groups to develop mathematical models of SARS-CoV-2 to study its spread and inform control efforts. The urgent demand for insight at the outset of the pandemic meant early models were typically either simple or repurposed from existing research agendas. Our group predominantly uses agent-based models (ABMs) to study fine-scale intervention scenarios.
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