Researchers model impact of vaccine campaigns on invasive Salmonella

In sub-Saharan Africa, invasive strains of non-typhoidal Salmonella (iNTS) have been found to be a cause of systemic, often fatal, infections in young children. With vaccines against NTS now rapidly approaching clinical trials, researchers, reporting in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, have modeled the potential impact of different vaccine schedules to decrease the hospitalization and death rates from iNTS in Bamako, Mali. The burden of iNTS in Mali was first discovered when researchers launched a surveillance system in Bamako to monitor the incidence of bacterial pathogens associated with invasive disease–such as septicemia, bacteremia, and meningitis–among pediatric patients. Vaccines against Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib) and Streptococcus pneumoniae have led to declines in invasive disease from those pathogens, especially in the youngest patients, making NTS the predominant invasive pathogen in children aged 5 and under. In the new work, Myron Levine, of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and colleagues collected anonymized data...