As a result of the ongoing Syrian civil war, almost 3 million refugees moved to Turkey since 2011 because of security reasons. However, the government operated refugee camps have been largely inadequate to accommodate this huge number of refugees. Therefore, almost 91% of the Syrian refugees live out of government-operated camps. According to a Turkish Disaster and Emergency Management Agency (AFAD) report, 45.4% of the children under 5 years old who live out of camps are not vaccinated against polio. This presents a serious health threat to the local population and the whole region. In order to deal with this potential risk, local vaccine distribution strategies that encourage vaccination should be developed for the cities that are close to Syrian border. We develop a mathematical model with which we determine the optimal number of polio vaccines that needs to be administered for each age group and the region considering the vaccination history of individuals. Different vaccination strategies (i) by age, (ii) by region, and (iii) by age-population are compared for cost effectiveness.
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/gul-kremer/174/
This proceeding is published as Günay, Elif Elçin, Kijung Park, Sena Aydoğan, and Gül E. Okudan Kremer. "Vaccine Distribution Strategies against Polio: An Analysis of Turkey Scenario." IISE Annual Conference and Expo 2019. Proceedings of a meeting held May 18-21, 2019, Orlando, Florida, USA. Posted with permission.