Epidemic meningococcal meningitis remains a serious health threat in the African meningitis belt. New meningococcal conjugate vaccines are relatively costly and their efficiency will depend on cost savings realized from no longer having to respond …

This article, published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, discusses an anthropologic and economic study in Burkina Faso to understand perceptions and behavior relative to meningitis and to determine the cost of illness from bacterial …

Epidemic meningococcal meningitis continues to be an important worldwide cause of morbidity and mortality, especially in developing countries. Throughout its history, a number of "critical episodes" have occurred that have enhanced understanding of …

The epidemiology of meningococcal meningitis in the African meningitis belt is characterized by seasonality, localized epidemics, and epidemic waves. To facilitate research and surveillance, the authors of this article, published in BMC Infectious …

This article, published in the World Health Organization's (WHO's) Weekly Epidemiological Record, provides the WHO recommendation for detecting and responding to meningococcal meningitis epidemics in highly-endemic countries in Africa. In each …

Group A meningococcal disease has been an important public health problem in sub-Saharan Africa for over a century. From 2003 to 2009 a monovalent group A conjugate vaccine, MenAfriVac™, was developed through an innovative public/private …

This article, published in the Lancet, reviews the currently available vaccines against meningococcal disease, as well as research and development efforts toward the development of additional vaccines against the disease. ABSTRACT …

This web page provides frequently updated information about current disease outbreaks, as well as disease-specific archives of past alerts and links to related resources.

The authors of this article, published in The American Journal of Epidemiology, use data on immunization with serogroup C meningococcal conjugate vaccines in England and Wales to develop and apply a mathematical model that investigates the …

This article, published in The Lancet, focuses on the three most common causes of acute bacterial meningitis: Haemophilus influenzae, Streptococcus pneumoniae, and Neisseria meningitidis. The authors compare patterns of meningitis attributable to …

In 2010, Burkina Faso conducted a country-wide campaign to introduce a new Group A meningococcal conjugate vaccine, MenAfriVac™. Leading up to this effort, the following challenges were successfully managed: (1) conducting a large safety study …

This article, published in Health Affairs, discusses a new affordable vaccine against Group A meningococcus, the most common cause of large and often fatal African epidemics of meningitis, that was introduced in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger in …

This comment, published in The Lancet, is based on a review of the study "Emergency Vaccination Against Epidemic Meningitis in Ghana: Implications for the Control of Meningococcal Disease in West Africa." The author concludes that …

This article, published in The Lancet, assessed the potential effects of different vaccination strategies against meningococcal disease using data from the 1997 meningococcal outbreak in northern Ghana. Using a simple mathematical model, …

This study, published in Emerging Infectious Diseases, provides evidence that the relationship between the environment and the location of meningitis epidemics is quantifiable. The study proposes a model based on environmental …

This article, published in the journal Vaccine, emphasizes Group A Neisseria meningitidis as a health problem in Africa and disccuses the potential for a proactive control strategy for epidemic meningitis with the use of …

Published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, this article discusses the current epidemiological profile of meningococcal disease and the vaccines that are currently available in the United States. The article also outlines what would be required for a …

This study, published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, used retrospective surveillance to identify cases of laboratory-diagnosed bacterial meningitis in Niamey, Niger, from 1981 to 1996. The study analyzed the cases …

Neisseria meningitidis causes meningococcal disease, a severe bacterial infection of the bloodstream or meninges, worldwide. The disease is most common among young children, but the existing polysaccharide vaccines have been sparsely used because …

This article, published in Neurological Research, discusses the changes in the epidemiology of meningococcal disease in Latin America and comments on the development and potential impact of new vaccines for the prevention of the disease. The authors …

Before the 2010 to 2011 introduction of the first serogroup A meningococcal conjugate vaccine developed solely for Africa (MenAfriVac), evaluations of the existing meningitis surveillance in Burkina Faso and Mali were conducted to assess the …

This article, published in The Journal of Health, Population, and Nutrition, summarizes the general steps required for meningococcal vaccine development, reviews the use of immunogenicity criteria as a licensing strategy for new meningococcal …

This study, published in Epidemiology and Infection, evaluated an ecological model based on absolute humidity and land cover type to predict the location of meningitis epidemics in the Sahelian region known as the African Meningitis Belt. The …

This article, published in Expert Review of Vaccines, discusses morbidity and mortality due to meningococcal serogroups A, C, Y, and W-135 and the ability of monovalent meningococcal serogroup C conjugate (MCC) vaccines to reduce the burden of …

Hailed as "the greatest public health success story of all time," today childhood immunization faces obstacles never seen before. While immunization still saves three million young lives each year, millions more could be saved if there were enough …