Peer-reviewed article
Impact of immunization strategies, public health and social measures on the incidence of varicella among children aged 0-14 years in Quzhou City.
Quanjun Fang, Hui Yang, Shuangqing Wang, Xiaoying Gong, Canjie Zheng et al. ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This study examined how different immunization strategies and public health measures affected varicella (chickenpox) cases in children aged 0-14 years in Quzhou City, China from 2006 to 2022. When a two-dose vaccination strategy was introduced, varicella cases dropped immediately but did not stay low over time. Public health measures also reduced cases initially but had limited long-term impact. The study found that low coverage of the second vaccine dose, ranging from 46-61%, prevented the strategy from working as well as it could.
Key points
- Two-dose vaccination strategy reduced monthly varicella incidence by 8.193 per 100,000 immediately after introduction (p = .029)
- Public health and social measures reduced monthly incidence by 13.518 per 100,000 immediately after implementation (p = .006)
- Neither intervention produced sustained significant reduction in varicella incidence over the long term
- Second-dose vaccine coverage in Quzhou was only 46.35% to 60.65%, below the WHO-recommended 80% threshold
- Public health measures alone have limited influence on varicella transmission dynamics
Limitations
The study is observational and cannot establish causation definitively; other unmeasured factors may have influenced varicella incidence trends during the study period. The analysis focuses on one city and may not be generalizable to other regions with different vaccination uptake patterns.
Abstract
This study evaluates the impact of different immunization strategies and public health and social measures (PHSMs) on varicella incidence among children in Quzhou. Data on varicella cases among children aged 0-14 y in Quzhou from 2006 to 2022 were collected. An interrupted time-series (ITS) model was used to analyze trends in monthly varicella incidence during the implementation of the single-dose and two-dose vaccination strategies and the PHSMs. ITS analysis indicated that, following the introduction of the two-dose strategy, the varicella monthly incidence rate decreased immediately by 8.193 per 100,000 (p = .029). After the implementation of PHSMs, it also decreased immediately, with a reduction of 13.518 per 100,000 (p = .006). In terms of long-term effectiveness, neither the two-dose immunization strategy nor the implementation of PHSMs produced a sustained and significant reduction in varicella incidence. The effectiveness of the two-dose strategy may have been constrained by the low second-dose VarV coverage in Quzhou, which ranged from 46.35% to 60.65%, well below the 80% threshold recommended by the World Health Organization. Although the implementation of PHSM can serve as a useful supplementary approach to preventing childhood varicella, their influence on transmission dynamics appears relatively limited.
Findings the Hub has extracted
Each claim below is labelled by its type of design and links back to this report.
- Intervention
- Introduction of two-dose varicella vaccination strategy and public health and social measures (PHSMs)
- Population
- Children aged 0-14 years in Quzhou City, China
Key finding
Two-dose strategy: immediate reduction of 8.193 per 100,000 monthly incidence (p = .029)
Fang et al. · PubMed (US National Library of Medicine) · 3 Mar 2026