The Lancet Infectious Diseases
Sep 2014 Volume 14 Number 9 p779 – 898
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/issue/current

Editorial
Ebola in west Africa
The Lancet Infectious Diseases

Comment
Pneumococcal conjugate vaccination: correlates of protection
Angel Vila-Corcoles, Olga Ochoa-Gondar
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Infections caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae are a major health problem worldwide. Susceptibility to pneumococcal infections varies with age, and is highest in young infants and older adults. Death from pneumococcus is the most common vaccine-preventable illness in infants younger than 5 years, with an estimated 700 000 to 1 million deaths occurring yearly throughout the world in this age group.1

What can rotavirus vaccines teach us about rotavirus?
Jim P Buttery, Carl D Kirkwood
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Suspected and unexpected clinical features of pathogens might only become apparent during clinical trials to test vaccines or after implementation of vaccination programmes. For example, the role of Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) in early childhood pneumonia was not evident until findings of a clinical vaccine trial in The Gambia showed that—after 3 years of follow-up—Hib caused more than 20% of radiologically defined pneumonia in infants.1,2 Moreover, the ability of different pneumococcal serotypes, but not meningococcal serogroups, to replace competing strains in nasopharyngeal carriage and invasive disease was only noted after implementation of pneumococcal and group C meningococcal glycoconjugate vaccines.

Islam and polio
Fatima Riaz, Yasir Waheed
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Public health interventions and policies do not have a uniform response worldwide. Medical anthropologists appreciate the role of cultural epidemiology in establishing the community response and, concomitantly, the disease’s fate.1 In the case of polio, which has a viable vaccine, social misconceptions and religious misinterpretations receive the most media attention as the barriers preventing the disease from tipping over into complete eradication.2

Epidemiology of invasive meningococcal disease in the Netherlands, 1960–2012: an analysis of national surveillance data
Merijn W Bijlsma, Vincent Bekker, Matthijs C Brouwer, Lodewijk Spanjaard, Diederik van de Beek, Arie van der Ende

Epidemiology of bacterial meningitis in the USA from 1997 to 2010: a population-based observational study
Rodrigo Lopez Castelblanco, MinJae Lee, Rodrigo Hasbun

Safety and immunogenicity of a recombinant live attenuated tetravalent dengue vaccine (DENVax) in flavivirus-naive healthy adults in Colombia: a randomised, placebo-controlled, phase 1 study
Jorge E Osorio, Ivan D Velez, Cynthia Thomson, Liliana Lopez, Alejandra Jimenez, Aurelia A Haller, Shawn Silengo, Jaclyn Scott, Karen L Boroughs, Janae L Stovall, Betty E Luy, John Arguello, Mark E Beatty, Joseph Santangelo, Gilad S Gordon, Claire Y-H Huang, Dan T Stinchcomb

Serotype-specific effectiveness and correlates of protection for the 13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine: a postlicensure indirect cohort study
Nick J Andrews, Pauline A Waight, Polly Burbidge, Emma Pearce, Lucy Roalfe, Marta Zancolli, Mary Slack, Shamez N Ladhani, Elizabeth Miller, David Goldblatt

Distribution of rotavirus strains and strain-specific effectiveness of the rotavirus vaccine after its introduction: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Eyal Leshem, Ben Lopman, Roger Glass, Jon Gentsch, Krisztián Bányai, Umesh Parashar, Manish Patel