www.who.int/">World Health Organization, the United Nations agency responsible for global public health, recently recommended universal introduction of rubella vaccination, a major step towards potentially eradicating the disease. The change in global public health policy removes barriers that have kept countries, primarily in Africa, from introducing rubella vaccination and was influenced in part by research led by scientists at Penn State.
"Many people suspected that the existing policy was too restrictive and that it was propagating serious inequity because countries needed to prove that they could meet established benchmarks for vaccination coverage. The countries that were failing to meet the benchmark were the poorest countries, and it kept them from additional resources that could help them do so," said Matt Ferrari, professor of biology and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at the Huck Institutes of Life Sciences at Penn State. Ferrari was part of the team from the Measles and Rubella Partnership, a global partnership founded in 2001 and led by the American Red Cross, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and others, that advocated for the policy change.
Rubella is a viral infectious disease that causes mild symptoms in children. However, among adults, there's a potential risk for congenital rubella syndrome (CRS), a serious health condition that can occur if a pregnant person contracts the virus and passes it to her developing fetus, leading to birth defects and disability. According to the WHO, approximately 32,000 infants are born with CRS each year.
"When you introduce vaccination, you get a rapid decline in rubella disease and CRS because the amount of circulating virus in the population is reduced. Then, after a period of time where rubella is under control but not gone, the risk for CRS creeps up again. There's a potential for that risk to exceed the pre-vaccination risk," Ferrari said. That's because the number of rubella infections in people of reproductive age - who were neither infected nor vaccinated as children - increases even as the total number of rubella cases goes down with vaccination.
