Voluntary vaccination programs shown effective for some diseases
Friday, February 6, 2009 - 12:42
in Health & Medicine
"Conventional wisdom - and conventional theory - tells us that when infection can potentially be spread to almost everyone in a community, such as for measles, a disease outbreak can never be contained using voluntary vaccination," says Chris Bauch and Ana Persic, researchers from the University of Guelph. "However, our work shows conventional wisdom may be wrong for diseases that are spread primarily through close contact, such as smallpox." Their findings appear in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology on February 6th.