Clinic on Meaningful Modeling of Epidemiological Data

The thirteenth MMED clinic ~ June 17-29, 2024 ~ Muizenberg, Cape Town, South Africa

  1. Projects
  2. Potential project

Impact of birth dose hepatitis B vaccination in South Africa

Overview

In 2016, WHO released a global strategy for eliminating viral hepatitis as a public health problem by 2030, defined as a 90% reduction in incidence and 65% reduction in mortality. Elimination of mother to child transmission of Hepatitis B is at the forefront of this strategy. This project will investigate the potential incremental impact of adding a Hepatitis B vaccine dose within the first 24 hours of life to the vaccination schedule in South Africa (currently, the first dose is administered at 6 weeks).

Things to consider

  • This group is recommended for:
    • Participants interested in modelling for policy making.
    • Participants interested in emerging relationships between age and disease.
    • Participants hoping to gain more experience in creating a model world, implementing an ODE model in R, and fitting the model to data.
  • This group will have the opportunity to engage in any of the following:
    • Defining model worlds tailored to address specific research questions.
    • Literature review to inform parameters.

Background

Hepatitis B virus (HBV) affects the liver, with prevalence of HBV among those with liver cancer in South Africa of 40-60%. The main mode of transmission is from mother to child. Vaccination was rolled out as part of national immunisation schedule in 1995. No nationally representative prevalence surveys have been performed, but among blood donors (a very low risk population) the impact of the vaccination programme is evident from the dramatic decreases in HBV prevalence among young donors between 2010 and 2021. The modelling for policy research question is whether adding a birth dose to the vaccination schedule will be a cost-effective intervention. This project will only focus on estimating the incremental impact of the birth dose towards HBV elimination.

Data

  • We will use data on Hepatitis B prevalence among a nationally representative sample of pregnant women in South Africa in 2017 and other publicly available data sources (such as vaccination coverage).