Researchers study existence of cross-protection between multiple strains of infectious disease

Using a unique data set spanning 40 years of dengue fever incidence in Thailand, an international team led by biostatistician Nicholas Reich at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has for the first time estimated from data that after an initial dengue infection, a person is protected from infection with other strains for between one and three years. Their results have implications for designing more effective vaccine studies, say Reich and colleagues at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the University of Michigan and the Armed Forces Research Institute of Medical Sciences (AFRIMS) in Bangkok. Findings appear in the current issue of the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Dengue fever is a mosquito-transmitted viral infection that sickens 5 percent of the world’s population each year and recently has begun to emerge in parts of the southeast United States. Building on a long-standing collaboration with Thai health officials and AFRIMS, Reich...