We reviewed the evidence on whether vaccinating household contacts, in addition to giving antibiotics, helps prevent invasive meningococcal disease (IMD) after someone in the household gets sick. We found that even when household members received effective antibiotics, the risk of getting meningococcal disease remained higher than public health thresholds for mass vaccination. By analyzing several studies, we estimated that vaccinating between 640 and 1680 household contacts could prevent one case of the disease, which is similar to other cost-effective vaccination programs. Although the data had limitations, we concluded that combining vaccination with antibiotics for household contacts of cases caused by vaccine-preventable strains is likely to reduce risk and be cost-effective, especially in developed countries. We recommended this approach for contacts who have not already received the appropriate vaccine and noted that new vaccines may expand protection in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was invited to contribute to this work because I volunteered to analyse a comprehensive database from Polish investigations of household IMD clusters, which was efficiently published and incorporated into this systematic review. The main work was carried out by Marteen, a fellow of the EPIET training programme based in Bristol. His mentor, James Stuart\u2014a leading expert in the epidemiology and management of invasive meningococcal disease (IMD)\u2014supervised the study and subsequently invited me to join a consortium of experts working to standardise IMD management across European countries.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Article in English published in the journal Epidemiology & Infection<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":1074,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":true},"class_list":["post-1286","publikacje","type-publikacje","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pawel.stefanoff.pl\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publikacje\/1286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pawel.stefanoff.pl\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publikacje"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pawel.stefanoff.pl\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/publikacje"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pawel.stefanoff.pl\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pawel.stefanoff.pl\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}