In April’s Reddit IAmA in association with eLife, Prabhat Jha, Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto will be answering your questions.
Prabhat is lead investigator of the Million Death Study in India, which quantifies the causes of premature mortality in more than two million homes from 1997-2014, including the contribution of tobacco, alcohol, diet and other key risk factors.
In a recent article published in eLife (‘The impact of measles immunization campaigns in India using a nationally representative sample of 27,000 child deaths’), he and his colleagues highlighted the success of mass measles vaccination campaigns launched in India in 2010. They applied a novel statistical method to data from the Million Death Study, examining 27,000 child deaths from 1.3 million representative households surveyed from 2005 to 2013. Their findings suggest that the measles vaccine campaigns saved 41,000 to 56,000 children in India during 2010 to 2013, or 39%–57% of the expected number of deaths nationally.
They also showed that mortality in children aged between one and 59 months fell more in the campaign states following launch (27%) than in the non-campaign states (11%). Their results hint at the possibility of eliminating deaths from measles in India, although this will require continued diligence to ensure high immunization rates among Indian children and ongoing tracking of measles deaths.
The hope is that the findings will help encourage greater uptake of vaccinations in children across the world.
Prabhat will be answering questions about this article and their research more broadly at 6pm BST (1pm EDT), April 25 on Reddit’s r/IAmA platform.
Prabhat is also a Series Editor for Disease Control Priorities 3, which examines solutions to major global health challenges, and was, until recently, a founding Senior Editor of eLife. His research focuses widely on the cause of death statistics, disease and tobacco control, and economics.
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