Examining the Implications of a 7th Grade Pertussis Booster Program in the State of Ohio
The state of Ohio has been witnessing an increase of pertussis incidence over the past few years. This increase could be attributed to better recognition, reporting, and waning vaccine immunity. As a result, Ohio has implemented a vaccine booster program for 7th graders to try to curb the incidence. We use a model from Hethcote [2] to model the behavior of pertussis in Ohio, based on parameters from Hethcote as well as from literature and data from the Ohio Department of Health. The model is then fit to incidence reports from the Ohio Department of Health and the behaviors are examined. We identified two scenarios that matched the data, one of which has low transmissability but high reporting and the other with high transmissibility and low reporting. The vaccine booster is then implemented in the model with different reporting rates and incidence contributions. We observed that the impact of the booster seemed to be dependent on reporting rate of cases, where the higher reporting rate leads to a greater impact than the lower reporting rate.
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