Meningitis Seroprevalence and Carriage in Burkina Faso

Late 2008, Burkina Faso was planning a demonstration project of group A conjugate vaccines. To interpret the impact of the mass vaccination campaign, information on correlates of protection against Neisseria meningitidis serogroup A (NmA) disease were needed—and to date, no studies had been completed in the region. This data is important because many factors, such as the environment, genetics, nutrition, strain microbiology, and co-infections, are likely to differ between industrialized countries and countries of the meningitis belt, which may substantially alter the protection from bactericidal or Immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies.

In this context, AMP led a seroprevalence study in an unvaccinated population in Burkina Faso. The objectives were to:

• Estimate the age-specific prevalence of IgG and bactericidal antibodies to NmA in the general urban population
• Analyze the correlation between the age-specific seroprevalence and incidence of group A meningococcal meningitis
• Estimate the prevalence of NmA carriage in the general urban population
• Establish a baseline seroprevalence for NmA before the introduction of country-wide mass vaccination with group A conjugate vaccine, in order to measure the persistence of antibodies after vaccine introduction
• Estimate the serotype- and age-specific prevalence of Streptococcus pneumoniae (Sp) carriage in the general urban population