In this week's PLoS Medicine, Justin Lessler of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, USA and colleagues describe a method that estimates the fraction of a population accessible to vaccination activities, and apply it to measles vaccination in three African countries: Ghana, Madagascar, and Sierra Leone. Their estimates can be used to identify countries where problems in vaccine delivery may exist, thereby providing important operational guidance on how to improve vaccine coverage.
The authors comment: "Here we have introduced a method by which administrative coverage estimates can be combined with a cross-sectional survey to estimate the effectiveness of vaccination programs. This method not only attempts to correct coverage estimates, but distinguishes between issues of overall coverage and vaccine wastage within vaccination activities."
Source: Public Library of Science