Back to Annual Meeting Page		American Public Health Association 133rd Annual Meeting & Exposition December 10-14, 2005 Philadelphia, PA

Abstract #122205

Leland J. Yee, PhD, MPH, Dept. of Epidemiology, University of Pittsburgh, Graduate School of Public Health, 130 DeSoto Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15261 and Scott D. Rhodes, PhD, MPH, CHES, Department of Public Health Sciences, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Section on Social Sciences and Health Policy, Medical Center Boulevard, Winston-Salem, NC 27157-1063, 336/713.5080, srhodes@wfubmc.edu.

The majority of the world's cases of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection are within developing countries. If a vaccine for HIV becomes available, a number of issues need to be addressed before effective vaccination can occur. We propose that prior experiences with vaccination for hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection may serve as a model for effective HIV vaccination, should such a vaccine ever become available. The cost of the vaccine and its multiple dose schedule make it an ideal model for HIV vaccination, which has been postulated to be a vaccine that will require multiple doses and be of moderate to high economic cost. Furthermore, hepatitis B and HIV share many of the same routes of transmission, which suggests that many of the same risk groups will be targeted. Can our experiences in the developed world be extrapolated to the developing world? Clearly, different circumstances surround vaccination in the developing and the developed world. Moreover, political, cultural, and economic circumstances vary widely between the different regions of the developing world. Drawing on experiences with HBV vaccination in regions of the world such as Africa and Asia may provide insights into important aspects of vaccine delivery that will not only improve hepatitis B vaccination in endemic regions, but identify factors that may facilitate distribution of an HIV vaccine. Carefully-designed empirical evaluations of HBV vaccination in regions of the developing world may serve to both improve HBV vaccination as well as provide a framework for future HIV vaccination in the developing world.

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