Investigators: Jan Jones, Jennifer Kent, Lisa Montgomery, Peter Richmond, Sonia McAlister, Tanya Stoney
Project description
Despite long-term high pertussis vaccine coverage, Australia has the highest recorded all-age incidence of pertussis in the world. Little is known about the duration of pertussis immunity in adults.
Health care workers (HCWs) in paediatric hospitals have been recommended to receive pertussis booster immunisations (Australian Immunisation Handbook 2013) as they are both at increased of exposure to pertussis in the hospital and causing nosocomial transmission to their patients. It is now almost 10 years since Boostrix™ was introduced into Western Australia (2004) with high uptake by employees at Princess Margaret Hospital for Children in Perth and health care workers. However, little is known about the antibody persistence, reactogenicity and immunogenicity of booster vaccination. We propose to use this unique opportunity of a cohort of HCWs being offered booster dTpa immunisation to study the duration of both serologic and CMI immunity in adults and the immunogenicity and reactogenicity to booster immunisation in comparison to HCWs and researchers working with children receiving dTpa vaccine for the first time. The assays developed for assessment of B-cell and T-cell immunity in this study will also be able to be transferred to paediatric populations and should help guide development of optimal vaccine schedules and development of new vaccines to help prevent this serious infection.
Project partner: GSK