Measles immunomodulation of diptheria

Overview

Measles is known to suppress infected individuals’ immune systems for a short period following infection. Mina et al. (2015) found that mortality caused by nonmeasles infectious disease was tightly correlated with measles incidence in both the US and the UK, both before and after widespread vaccination. This project will take this hypothesis further to assess whether lag-measles incidence is correlated with recorded incidence of infection of diptheria from longitudinal data sets on measles and diptheria incidence at the US state-level, as made available by Project Tycho.

Things to consider

• This group is recommended for:
  • Participants interested in understanding longterm historical dynamics of acute immunizing diseases.
  • Participants interested in analyses spanning wide regions
  • Participants interested in coupled infectious disease dynamics.
• This group will have the opportunity to engage in any of the following:
  • Learn how to use mixed effect regression models on derived state variables (lag-measles incidence)
  • Build a dynamic model of coupled infectious disease dynamics, with demographic drivers
  • Handle large data sets in R
• Relevant Sessions include:
  • Introduction to Thinking About Data I (Hargrove) - Slides
  • Introduction to Thinking About Data II (Scott) - Slides
  • Likelihood fitting and dynamic models I and II

Background

If measles immunomodulation reduces childhood mortality from non-measles infectious diseases, then we might expect to see that immunomodulation reduces the incidence of those infectious diseases themselves. Diptheria has a case fatality rate of 5-10% and so some of those deaths might have been due to that disease. We are interested in seeing if we can identify a correlation between lag-measles incidence and diptheria incidence across American states over a long time period.

Data

• Project Tycho.

Resources

References

• Mina MJ, Metcalf CJE, Swart RL de, Osterhaus ADME, Grenfell1 BT. Long-term measles-induced immunomodulation increases overall childhood infectious disease mortality. Science (80- ). 2015;348: 694–699. doi:10.1126/science.aaa3662 - Supplementary Material
• Goodridge HS, Ahmed SS, Curtis N, Kollmann TR, Levy O, Netea MG, et al. Harnessing the beneficial heterologous effects of vaccination. Nat Rev Immunol. 2016;16: 392–400. doi:10.1038/nri.2016.43.
• Mogensen SW, Aaby P, Smedman L, Martins CL, Rodrigues A, Benn CS, et al. Introduction of standard measles vaccination in an urban African community in 1979 and overall child survival: a reanalysis of data from a cohort study. BMJ Open. 2016;6: e011317. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2016-011317.

Tutorials

• Lab 1: ODE models in R - R Tutorials
• Lab: MLE fitting of an SIR model to prevalence data - R Tutorials
• Lab: Data Wrangling - R Tutorials