Date of Award

1-1-2019

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Public Health (MPH)

Department

School of Public Health

First Advisor

Daniel Weinberger

Abstract

It is important for public health professionals to understand the effects of vaccine introduction and compare different types of vaccinations. This study will focus on understanding the pre and post vaccination effects of two different infectious diseases: pneumonia and gastrointestinal disorders. One of approaches of getting the accurate estimate of vaccine impact is by comparing rates or trends of the targeted disease in the years after introduction with rates of trend in the year before introduction using a time-series analysis. Specifically, in this study, the synthetic controls method implements an approach to estimating the causal effect of a designed intervention on a time series. With this new approach, potential comparison time series are combined into a composite and are used to generate a counterfactual estimate, which can be compared with the time series of interest, which are effect of vaccines on pneumonia or gastrointestinal disorders after the intervention. After conducting time series analysis on five different regions of Brazil and in national level, this study finds that the introduction of pneumonia vaccine in five regions of Brazil results in a significant increasing in case prevented and decreasing in observed cases compared to synthetic control estimated cases. However, unlike pneumonia vaccine, introduction of gastrointestinal disorder vaccine is not significantly effective for certain region of Brazil in both age groups.

Comments

This is an Open Access Thesis.

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