Research on risk management strategies for polioviruses

Even though polio no longer causes widespread fear, take a couple of minutes to learn more about polioviruses and why you should still care about them. In 2001, we launched a collaboration with the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) with support from the CDC-Harvard Joint Initiative in Vaccine Economics (JIVE) to create useful analytical modeling tools to help decision makers consider the implications of the various global immunization and risk management choices after eradicating wild polioviruses. Over a decade later, this research collaboration continues to thrive and expand, and we thank many contributors. In addition to many presentations, our polio research led to peer-reviewed publications related to:

• the decision options that national and international health leaders will face after eradicating wild polioviruses
• dynamically modeling poliovirus transmission and outbreaks
• the health and financial benefits of historical poliovirus vaccination in the United States
• 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)
• the choice of eradication vs. control (this paper won the 2008 Jay Wright Forrester Award from the System Dynamics Society)
• 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
• the need for global cooperation on a vaccine stockpile and coordinated OPV cessation
• the role of system dynamics in our research
• the consequences of priority shifting when seeking to eradicate multiple diseases
• a framework for optimizing the future use of vaccines from the global polio vaccine stockpile
• building an "individual-based" or "agent-based" model to explore and optimize post wild poliovirus eradication outbreak response strategies
• the economic and health benefits of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative
• trends in the risk of U.S. polio outbreaks and poliovirus vaccine availability for outbreak response
• the role of risk analysis in polio eradication
• the probability of undetected wild poliovirus circulation after apparent global interruption of transmission
• current polio global eradication and control policy options, including perspectives from modeling and prerequisites for oral poliovirus vaccine cessation
• prevention as the new paradigm in global health
• modeling poliovirus risks and the legacy of polio eradication
• pre-eradication national vaccine decision options
• expert review of the literature on poliovirus immunity and transmission
• poliovirus immunity and transmission quantitative synthesis of expert assessments of the evidence
• modeling population immunity
• cVDPV risks and characterization of OPV evolution
• characterizing poliovirus transmission and evolution using a model applied to diverse situations