The impact of measles immunization campaigns in India using a nationally representative sample of 27,000 child deaths
- St Michael's Hospital, Canada
- King George's Medical University, India
- Government of India, India
- Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, India
- National Institute of Medical Statistics, Indian Council of Medical Research, India
Abstract
India comprises much of the persisting global childhood measles mortality. India implemented a mass second-dose measles immunization campaign in 2010. We used interrupted time series and multilevel regression to quantify the campaign's impact on measles mortality using the nationally representative Million Death Study (including 27,000 child deaths in 1.3 million households surveyed from 2005–2013). 1–59-month measles mortality rates fell more in the campaign states following launch (27%) versus non-campaign states (11%). Declines were steeper in girls than boys and were specific to measles deaths. Measles mortality risk was lower for children living in a campaign district (OR 0.6, 99%CI 0.4–0.8) or born in 2009 or later (OR 0.8, 99%CI 0.7–0.9). The campaign averted up to 41,000–56,000 deaths during 2010–13, or 39%–57% of the expected deaths nationally. Elimination of measles deaths in India is feasible.
Data availability
Under legal agreement with the Registrar General of India, the MDS data cannot be redistributed outside of the Centre for Global Health Research. To request MDS data access procedures or to set up a data transfer agreement, please contact the Office of the Registrar General, RK Puram, New Delhi, India (rgoffice.rgi@nic.in). The public census reports can be found at http://www.censusindia.gov.in/vital_statistics/SRS_Statistical_Report.html. Source data files have been provided for Figures 1,2,3,4, Figure 1 - figure supplement 1, and Table 2. National survey data (from Figure 5) can be obtained free of charge from the following websites: http://rchiips.org/nfhs/NFHS-4Report.shtml (NFHS-4); http://rchiips.org/nfhs/report.shtml (NFHS-3); http://rchiips.org/DLHS-4.html (DLHS-4); http://rchiips.org/prch-3.html (DLHS-3); and http://rchiips.org/state-report-rch2.html (DLHS-2).
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Canadian Institutes of Health Research (FDN154277)
- Prabhat Jha
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
- Prabhat Jha
National Institutes of Health (R01TW05991-01)
- Prabhat Jha
External funding is from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (http://www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca, Grant FDN154277), the US National Institutes of Health (https://www.nih.gov, Grant R01TW05991-01), and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Reviewing Editor
- Mark Jit, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and Public Health England, United Kingdom
Ethics
Human subjects: Ethics approval for the MDS was obtained from the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Research, St. John's Research Institute and St. Michael's Hospital, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Consent procedures have been published earlier (Gomes et al., 2017; Jha et al., 2006a; Registrar General of India, 2016).
Version history
- Received: November 3, 2018
- Accepted: February 15, 2019
- Accepted Manuscript published: March 5, 2019 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: April 16, 2019 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2019, Wong et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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The impact of measles immunization campaigns in India using a nationally representative sample of 27,000 child deaths
eLife 8:e43290.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.43290
Further reading
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Measles vaccination campaigns have saved the lives of about 50,000 Indian children in three years.
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