Rationale for pertussis booster vaccination throughout life in Europe.

Although the introduction of universal pertussis immunisation in infants has greatly reduced the number of reported cases in infants and young children, disease incidence has been increasing in adolescents and adults in recent years. This changing epidemiological pattern is probably largely attributable to waning immunity after natural infection or vaccination. Furthermore, improved diagnostic testing, active surveillance, changes in disease susceptibility, vaccine characteristics, and increased awareness of the disease might also be contributing factors.

Cost-effectiveness of adolescent pertussis vaccination for the Netherlands: using an individual-based dynamic model.

Background: Despite widespread immunization programs, a clear increase in pertussis incidence is apparent in many developed countries during the last decades. Consequently, additional immunization strategies are considered to reduce the burden of disease. The aim of this study is to design an individual-based stochastic dynamic framework to model pertussis transmission in the population in order to predict the epidemiologic and economic consequences of the implementation of universal booster vaccination programs.

Conclusions on (cost-)effectiveness of pertussis booster vaccination strategies highly dependent on selections made in evidence review.

This letter reacts on a paper recently published in this journal, reviewing the effectiveness and (cost-)effectiveness of pertussis booster vaccination strategies. We argue that a different selection of (cost-)effectiveness data could validly be made than the one presented in the review as being considered most robust. In particular, we explicitly present an alternative set of (cost-)effectiveness data.

Twenty years of pediatric tuberculous meningitis: a retrospective cohort study in the western cape of South Africa.

Objective: Tuberculous meningitis is the most severe extrapulmonary complication of tuberculosis, with high morbidity and mortality rates. The objective of this study was to assess the relationship between presenting clinical characteristics and outcome of pediatric tuberculous meningitis.

Patients And Methods: We present a retrospective cohort study of all of the children diagnosed with tuberculous meningitis in a large university hospital in South Africa between January 1985 and April 2005.