Up to one-fifth of pertussis cases in Taiwanese children aged 3-35 months from 1996 to 2012 could have been prevented with on-time vaccination, reported Wan-Ting Huang and coauthors at the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control, Taipei.
Although vaccination coverage was 97.4% for three or more pertussis vaccine doses among Taiwanese children aged 12-23 months, many had not received proper vaccination at the right time.
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“The study indicated that in Taiwan, undervaccination was decreasing but had placed young children at risk for pertussis,” the authors wrote.
Read the full study from Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics (2016. doi: 10.1080/21645515.2016.1249552).