Epidemiology and Infection
Volume 144 – Issue 09 – July 2016
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?jid=HYG&tab=currentissue

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Short Report
Arboviruses
Potential exposure to Zika virus for foreign tourists during the 2016 Carnival and Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
M. N. BURATTINI, F. A. B. COUTINHO, L. F. LOPEZ, R. XIMENES, M. QUAM, A. WILDER-SMITH and E. MASSAD
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0950268816000649, Published online: 04 April 2016
[No abstract]

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Original Papers
Polio
Effective case/infection ratio of poliomyelitis in vaccinated populations
G. BENCSKÓa1a2 and T. FERENCIa3 c1 id1
a1 Polymer Chemistry Research Group, Institute of Materials and Environmental Chemistry, Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
a2 Institute of Chemistry, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
a3 John von Neumann Faculty of Informatics, Physiological Controls Group, Óbuda University, Budapest, Hungary
SUMMARY
Recent polio outbreaks in Syria and Ukraine, and isolation of poliovirus from asymptomatic carriers in Israel have raised concerns that polio might endanger Europe. We devised a model to calculate the time needed to detect the first case should the disease be imported into Europe, taking the effect of vaccine coverage – both from inactivated and oral polio vaccines, also considering their differences – on the length of silent transmission into account by deriving an ‘effective’ case/infection ratio that is applicable for vaccinated populations. Using vaccine coverage data and the newly developed model, the relationship between this ratio and vaccine coverage is derived theoretically and is also numerically determined for European countries. This shows that unnoticed transmission is longer for countries with higher vaccine coverage and a higher proportion of IPV-vaccinated individuals among those vaccinated. Assuming borderline transmission (R = 1·1), the expected time to detect the first case is between 326 days and 512 days in different countries, with the number of infected individuals between 235 and 1439. Imperfect surveillance further increases these numbers, especially the number of infected until detection. While longer silent transmission does not increase the number of clinical diseases, it can make the application of traditional outbreak response methods more complicated, among others.