Identification of effectiveness of Rubella vaccine before and after national vaccination program, Iran, Feb 2003

ABSTRACT

Rubella is a communicable and common disease of childhood and adulthood. In pregnancy the infection may cause severe complications in fetus. Then, knowing the rate of young women immunity to this disease in reproductive ages has a great importance in prevention of the disease. The aim of this study was to determine the immunity of 150 students of Shahrekord university of medical sciences against rubella before and after national vaccination program in Feb 2003 in Iran. In this quasi experimental study, the anti-rubella IgG titer in 150 students of Shahrekord university of medical sciences four weeks before and eight weeks after anti-rubella vaccination, was evaluated using ELISA method. Data was analyzed with Ttest by SPSS software. Eighty-six percent of our cases had protective titer of anti-rubella antibodies before rubella vaccination and 14% had no protective antibody titer. Besides, after vaccination 96.9% acquired complete protection against the disease and 3.1% had no protection. The effectiveness of vaccination was calculated about 80.95%.Based on the results of our study, vaccination against rubella in national vaccination program, was able to produce a protective immunity against rubella in studied cases