Vaccination antivariolique

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Vaccination strategies

By nature of their long-term deployment in challenging areas of the world, expatriate employees and their dependents are at increased risk for a number of infectious diseases. Targeted immunization strategies may decrease this risk. Expatriate employees and their dependents should be immunized before deployment, and programs should be established to provide booster immunizations if the risk is ongoing. When considering work-force productivity, work-force infectivity, and the common good, careful consideration should be given to establishing at least a basic immunization program for in-country nationals and their dependents.     

Influenza Vaccination

Influenza places a heavy burden on society. Distress of the community resulting from the disease translates into difficulties in family management as well as absence from work, school and social work. Moreover, there is still uncertainty in the current knowledge of anti-influenza immunity, even though, thanks to advances in molecular biology, the structure, chemistry and genetics of the virus are by now almost completely known. The greatest difficulty of the vaccine lies in the great variability of the influenza virus. The A and influenza viruses are the most important ones. The A viruses include several subtypes, H3N2 and H1N1 being presently the most important ones. The present vaccine, therefore, must be updated every year with strains that have the greatest probability of spreading in the human population during the influenza season. New influenza vaccines based on molecular biotechnology, such as DNA-recombinant or naked DNA vaccines, are currently widely studied and represent the vaccines that, hopefully, will bring about important improvements in the near future.     

Improving operating room schedules

Operating rooms (ORs) in US hospitals are costly to staff, generate about 70 % of a hospital’s revenues, and operate at a staffed-capacity utilization of 60-70 %. Many hospitals allocate blocks of OR time to individual or groups of surgeons as guaranteed allocation, who book surgeries one at a time in their blocks. The booking procedure frequently results in unused time between surgeries. Realizing that this presents an opportunity to improve OR utilization, hospitals manually reschedule surgery start times one or two days before each day of surgical operations. The purpose of rescheduling is to decrease OR staffing costs, which are determined by the number of concurrently staffed ORs. We formulate the rescheduling problem as a variant of the bin-packing problem with interrelated items, which are the surgeries performed by the same surgeon. We develop a lower bound (LB) construction algorithm and prove that the LB is at least (2/3) of the optimal staffing cost. A key feature of our approach is that we allow hospitals to have two shift lengths. Our analytical results form the basis of a branch-and-bound algorithm, which we test on data obtained from three hospitals. Experiments show that rescheduling saves significant staffing costs.     

Vaccination in emergencies

Nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) are the main actors of vaccine delivery during complex humanitarian emergencies such as large population displacements. This paper discusses the use of vaccinations against measles, cholera and meningitis in this context. The role of NGOs in the advocacy for making new and more effective vaccines available to the most vulnerable populations is also emphasised.