Estimation of vaccination coverage and waning immunity for measles, mumps, and rubella from serological surveys in Belgium, 2002 and 2006

Abstract

In this report, two existing methods ignoring waning were fitted to the 2002 and 2006 serological surveys conducted in Belgium to estimate the vaccination coverage: the saturated model (Gay ,2000), and the restricted cubic splines (RCS) model for the exposure probabilities (Goeyvaerts et al., 2012). In addition, an extension of these models to include waning of immunity to estimate the vaccination coverage, as recently developed by Wood, Goeyvaerts, and Hens (unpublished manuscript), was fitted. Among the methods ignoring waning, the best models were the RCS model with five and three knots for the 2002 and 2006 data, respectively. By including waning parameters, the vaccination coverage for older birth cohorts was largerWhen relying on the waning model, mumps presented the lowest seroconversion rate (0.92).The estimated waning parameters were '0.0050, 0.0045 , and 0 for measles, mumps, and rubella, respectively. The vaccination coverage was lower than the target of 90% of the WHO.