Speaker
Description
Gonorrhoea is a sexually transmitted infection caused by the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae. Although there is no specific vaccine against N. gonorrhoeae, the 4CMenB vaccine targeted to N. meningitidis, the bacterium (of the same genus) that causes meningitis, has been shown to be 30-40% effective in preventing gonorrhoea infection and since August 2025 is offered in the UK to those at highest risk of infection.
Although gonorrhoea is primarily driven by transmission within the Gay, Bisexual and Men-who-have-Sex-with-Men (GBMSM) community, women are more likely to have asymptomatic infection and, if left untreated, experience serious consequences, including ectopic pregnancy and infertility. I will present a deterministic transmission model, incorporating symptomatic and asymptomatic infection and heterogeneous mixing between GBMSM, females and heterosexual males, fitted via Markov chain Monte Carlo methods to gonorrhoea incidence data in England. I will highlight the challenges in interpreting the currently available data, in deciding how to fit a model to such data, and in dealing with the unidentifiability issues associated with a model that needs to be complex enough to be useful. I will also present indicative results from a cost-effectiveness analysis that explores an extensive range of vaccinating scenarios.
