Efficiency of Different Vaccination Strategies for Childhood Diseases: A Simulation Study

Abstract

Vaccination strategies are designed and applied to control or eradicate an infection from the population. This paper studies three different vaccination strategies used worldwide for many infectious diseases including childhood diseases. These strategies are the conventional constant vaccination strategy, the periodic step (pulse) vaccination strategy and finally the mixed vaccination strategy of both the constant and the periodic one. Simulation of the different vaccination programs is conducted using three parameter sets of measles, chickenpox and rubella. The Poincaré section is playing as a filter of our simulation results to show a wide range of possible behavior of our model. Critical vaccination level is been estimated from the results to prevent severe epidemics.