Assessing the effect of social contact structure on the impact of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines.

ABSTRACT: Although pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCVs) have greatly reduced diseases caused by vaccine-targeted serotypes (VT) of Streptococcus pneumoniae, vaccine impact may be eroded by the increase in rates of disease caused by non-vaccine serotypes (NVT). Here, we investigated the effect of social contact patterns on the dynamics of vaccine impact in carriage. We developed a neutral, age-structured, Susceptible-Colonized model incorporating VT-NVT co-colonization and verified it against real-world carriage data in children. Using social contact matrices from 34 countries, we assessed the impact of contact patterns on the time required to eliminate VT in a given age group (defined here as the time needed for the relative proportion of VT in overall carriage to drop by 95% after the introductio

SUBMITTER: Wong A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12504593 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature