The case for periodic OPV routine vaccination campaigns.

The possibility of periodic routine vaccination campaigns (PRVCs) is introduced in the context of a search for optimal oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) administration strategies. Like the usual continuous routine vaccination campaign (CRVC), PRVCs target only newborns. However, they are not necessarily implemented continuously in time. Using a dynamic and compartmental polio transmission model in a stochastic context, it is shown that some PRVCs can achieve much greater efficiency than CRVC in terms of probability of wild poliovirus (WPV) eradication, even though they never outperform CRVC in terms of total number of paralytic infections. Moreover, these PRVCs results can be obtained at a lower price than CRVC. It is also shown that, even though PRVCs do not perform better than pulse vaccination campaigns (PVCs) when only epidemiological outputs are valued, they can do so when a cost-benefit analysis is preferred.