Effective Allocation of Reactive Cholera Vaccines: A One or Two Dose Campaign?

Abstract

Every year for the past five years, over 100,000 cases of cholera have been reported to the World Health Organization (WHO). Though cholera is by no means a new disease, its containment in low-income countries has proved impossible with traditional measures such as WASH interventions. To supplement these far-reaching interventions, the WHO has proposed and begun to amass a reactive vaccine stockpile. As outbreaks are reported, the WHO intends to evaluate them and determine if a reactive vaccination supplement is appropriate. Understanding how to optimally allocate reactive vaccines is essential to the WHO’s evaluation of a country’s need for vaccines. The primary focus of this paper is to determine which conditions are appropriate for one or two dose reactive vaccination campaigns over a variety of parameter values. Though a range of parameter values are examined, the results indicate that the incremental benefit of the second dose is relatively small.