Impact and Effectiveness of Monovalent Rotavirus Vaccine Against Severe Rotavirus Diarrhea in Ghana (original) (raw)

2016, Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America

Ghana was among the first African nations to introduce monovalent rotavirus vaccine (RV1) into its childhood immunization schedule in April 2012. We aimed to assess the impact of vaccine introduction on rotavirus and acute gastroenteritis (AGE) hospitalizations and to estimate vaccine effectiveness (VE). Using data from 2 teaching hospitals, monthly AGE and rotavirus admissions by age were examined 40 months before and 31 months after RV1 introduction using interrupted time-series analyses. From January 2013, we enrolled children <2 years of age who were eligible for RV1 from a total of 7 sentinel sites across the country. To estimate VE, we fit unconditional logistic regression models to calculate odds ratios of vaccination by rotavirus case-patient status, controlling for potential confounders. Vaccine coverage ranged from 95% to 100% for dose 1 and 93% to 100% for dose 2. In the first 3 years after vaccine introduction, the percentage of hospital admissions positive for rotavi...