8129 Epub REPACK

Edelhauser E, Lupu-Dima L. One Year of Online Education in COVID-19 Age, a Challenge for the Romanian Education System. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 2021; 18(15):8129.

8129 epub

Edelhauser, Eduard, and Lucian Lupu-Dima. 2021. "One Year of Online Education in COVID-19 Age, a Challenge for the Romanian Education System" International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 18, no. 15: 8129.

To determine the effectiveness of vaccination, we examined incidence of TBE in Austria over 40 years, including 10 years without vaccination followed by 30 years with increasing vaccination coverage. We compared these data with those for the Czech Republic and Slovenia, 2 neighboring central European countries with high TBE incidence rates but comparatively low vaccination rates. We demonstrate that the strong decline of TBE observed only in Austria resulted from protection by vaccination and that the incidence rate for the nonvaccinated population remained as high as it was during the prevaccination era. The data from all 3 countries reveal a strong degree of annual and longer range variations, which are coincident in some but not all instances.

For several decades, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia have had well-established systems for documenting TBE cases (20,24,25), and, according to the National Reference Laboratories and/or National Public Health Institutes, the principles of the notification system were not changed over the period analyzed in this study. For all 3 countries, incidence rates refer to cases confirmed by laboratory diagnosis. This confirmation is based on TBE virus IgM and IgG ELISA results, which replaced the hemagglutination-inhibition and/or complement fixation assays used until the early 1980s in Austria and the early 1990s in the Czech Republic and Slovenia. In Austria, data are collected by the Department of Virology of the Medical University of Vienna, which serves as a national reference laboratory for TBE virus and other flaviviruses. The documentation includes the history of vaccination; for the purposes of this study, participants were subdivided into groups: those who followed the regular schedule of vaccination and those who had received an undefined number of vaccinations outside the recommended schedule. For a small (5%) proportion of TBE patients, no precise information about vaccination status could be obtained.

Results of joinpoint analysis of annual incidence rates (no. cases/100,000 population) of tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) in A) Austria (total population), B) Austria (nonvaccinated population), C) Czech Republic, and D) Slovenia. The lines in each panel represent the piecewise log-linear relationship between year and incidence. Estimated joinpoints and their 95% CIs are shown. 041b061a72