Japanese encephalitis (JE) is a mosquito-borne disease, known for its high mortality and disability rate among symptomatic cases. Many effective vaccines are available for JE, and the use of a recently developed and inexpensive vaccine, SA 14-14-2, has been increasing over the recent years particularly with Gavi support. Estimates of the local burden and the past impact of vaccination are therefore increasingly needed, but difficult due to the limitations of JE surveillance. In this study, we implemented a mathematical modelling method (catalytic model) combined with age-stratifed case data from our systematic review which can overcome some of these limitations. We estimate in 2015 JEV infections caused 100,308 JE cases (95%CI: 61,720 - 157,522) and 25,125 deaths (95%CI: 14,550 - 46,031) globally, and that between 2000 and 2015 307,774 JE cases (95%CI: 167,442- 509,583) were averted due to vaccination globally. Our results highlight areas that could have the greatest benefit from starting vaccination or from scaling up existing programs and will be of use to support local and international policymakers in making vaccine allocation decisions.
This study conducted a literature review and collated all data on age-stratified JE cases from these papers. The full list of these papers and the data extracted is available in the supplement.The code and data is available here: https://github.com/tranquanc123/JE_burden_estimates.
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
© 2020, Quan et al.
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