Research on risk management strategies for polioviruses
The work built on Kids Risk Project research that characterized the enormous health and financial benefits of poliovirus vaccination in the United States. Even though you might think that polioviruses are gone, take a couple of minutes to learn more background about polioviruses and why you should still care about them.
The overall goal of this project was to create a useful analytic modeling tool to help decision makers consider the implications of the various immunization and risk management strategies they will face after certification of the world as free of wild polioviruses. This effort focused on synthesizing existing information and characterizing the current knowledge and uncertainties using a structured model that explicitly addressed the risks, costs, and benefits of different policy options. This project was funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (U50/CCU300860, TS-0675; U01 IP000029; U66 IP000169-01) and it involved extensive collaboration with numerous polio experts at the CDC and the World Health Organization (WHO). In January 2009, the Kids Risk Project's research on polio moved to Kid Risk, Inc.
In addition to numerous presentations, the project produced peer-reviewed publications related to:
- the decision options that national and international health leaders will face in the future
- a dynamic disease model for polio outbreaks
- health and financial benefits of historical poliovirus vaccination in the United States
- context related to 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)
- polio eradication better than 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
- analysis of the need for global cooperation on a vaccine stockpile and coordinated OPV cessation