Abstract
Background:
Hepatitis A was ranked first among all of the different types of viral hepatitis in China, which occurred an average of 500,000 cases annually during the 1980s. A live attenuated hepatitis A vaccine was applied in preventing of the disease in 1992, large scale used in vaccination program in 1995, and incorporated in the Expanded Program of Immunization in 2008 in China.Objective:
The objective of this study was to determine whether, and to what extent, the decline in the incidence of hepatitis A in China was the result of hepatitis A (HA) vaccination.Materials and Methods:
Official documents and longitudinal serological follow-up studies were reviewed to compare the incidence of HA before and after the introduction of the vaccine.Results:
National trends in the incidence of HA in China saw rates decrease by 92.7% in 2009, compared to the levels seen in 1992. A mass vaccination program was carried out in 3-18 year old children (Wuhan City, China), and its protective efficacy was 85.4%. In a mass vaccination program of an entire population (Shenshi County, China), the annual HA incidence decreased from 359.7/100,000 to 17.7/100,000 (almost 20.3 times). There was a significant relationship found between vaccine coverage and the incidence of HA, the correlation of the negative regression was significant at the 1% (Kendall rank correlation, significant level P < 0.05).Conclusions:
In summary, this study highlights the important role of implementing a vaccination program in decreasing the incidence of HA, and the large protective efficacy of such a strategy, as demonstrated in ChinaFull Text
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Copyright
© 2012, Author(s). This open-access article is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which allows for unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited.