Research on risk management strategies for polioviruses

The work builds on Kids Risk Project research that characterized the enormous health and financial benefits of poliovirus vaccination in the United States. Even though you might think that polioviruses are gone, take a couple of minutes to learn more background about polioviruses and why you should still care about them.

The overall goal of this project is to create a useful analytic modeling tool to help decision makers consider the implications of the various immunization and risk management strategies they will face after certification of the world as free of wild polio virus.  This effort focuses on synthesis of existing information and characterization of the current knowledge and uncertainties using a structured model that explicitly addresses the risks, costs, and benefits of different options.  This project is funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (U50/CCU300860, TS-0675; U01 IP000029; U66 IP000169-01) and it involves extensive collaboration with numerous polio experts at the CDC and the World Health Organization (WHO).

In addition to numerous presentations, the project includes peer-reviewed publications related to:

• the decision options that national and international health leaders will face in the future
• a dynamic disease model for polio outbreaks
• health and financial benefits of historical poliovirus vaccination in the United States
• context related to risk management in a polio-free world
• characterization of the risks of future options
• characterization of the costs of future options
• trade-offs associated with outbreak response options
• consideration of the costs and value of global poliovirus surveillance
• lessons learned during this collaborative project (as of December 2006)
• polio eradication better than control (this paper won the 2008 Jay Wright Forrester Award)
• the risks, costs, and benefits of global policies for managing polio after eradication
• uncertainty and sensitivity analyses of our results related to global post-eradication policies
• analysis of the need for global cooperation on a vaccine stockpile and coordinated OPV cessation
• stockpile optimization modeling

We are currently working on characterizing the economics of global polio eradication.

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