Speaker
Description
Recent measles outbreaks in the United States and the United Kingdom have renewed public health concern over a disease once considered eliminated in these countries. Declining vaccination coverage, driven in part by changing public attitudes and policy discussions, has increased the risk of sustained transmission in previously protected populations. In particular, proposed changes to school-entry vaccination requirements in Florida raise important questions about the potential epidemiological consequences of reduced immunization.
In this work, we develop a compartmental framework stratified by age and vaccination status to derive and analyze conditions for disease persistence or eradication, such as the basic and control reproduction numbers, and the vaccine-induced herd immunity threshold. We incorporate Florida-specific demographic data, vaccination coverage among kindergarteners, and empirically estimated contact matrices to represent population mixing to explore how shifts in vaccination policy may influence transmission dynamics. This framework is extended to provide a flexible foundation for assessing the population-level impact of policy changes, possible pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions, and identifying conditions under which measles resurgence is most likely.
