Sero-epidemiology of Streptococcal Pneumoniae in developing countries and Issues Related to Vaccination

Abstract

Pneumococcal infections and disease are responsible for significant morbidity and mortality in developing countries. However, unlike the developed industrialized countries, the epidemiology of pneumococcal infections and exact disease burden are poorly defined in these regions. With the availability of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines followed by aggressive attempts from international health agencies and organizations to get these vaccines introduced in national immunization programs of developing countries, many issues have arisen. They include reliability of disease estimates put forward by World Health Organization, knowledge of circulating serogroups/serotypes of pneumococci in developing countries, need of devising an optimum dosing schedule, lack of indigenous cost-effective analysis of mass vaccination program, lack of disease surveillance system to monitor community impact of mass vaccination and the shortcomings of currently available pneumococcal conjugate vaccines. All these issues along with various issues related to introduction of a new vaccine in to the national immunization programs of developing countries are discussed in details in this review article.

Keywords

• Epidemiology, pneumococcal serotypes, pneumococcal conjugate vaccines