Abstract: Meningitis is an acute infection that causes inflammation of meninges, the protective membrane covering the brain and spinal cord. Meningitis can be bacterial, viral fungal, or noninfectious meningitis depending on the causative agent; in which viral fungal is less severe and bacterial meningitis is more severe leading to Neisseria Meningitidis, Streptococcus pneumoniae, and Haemophilus influenze. Neisseria Meningitidis, a human pathogenic bacteria, is responsible for one-third of all bacterial meningitis cases in the world. Neisseria meningitidis causes life-threatening meningococcemia when it infects blood and when it crosses the blood-brain barrier mixes with the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and becomes highly lethal. Invasive meningococcal disease (IMD) is the evolutionary dead end for this pathogen, since the ability to transmit the disease to other hosts will be lost after entering into the blood stream or central nervous system. This organism attacks people irrespective of age, but different vaccines are required for people of different ages. Notably, the cases have greatly decreased in Europe and North America with the introduction of conjugate vaccines (MenC and MenACWY) and in the sub-Saharan Africa with the introduction of MenAfriVac. The invention of conjugate vaccines not only protected from getting infected but put an impact on carriage as well. This helped in creating indirect protection to the unvaccinated population. Taking all these into consideration, immunization with new generation vaccines based on the age classes (such as infants to 1 year, adolescents, young adults and old age people) will have great impact on the disease and carriage. Hence there could a tremendous decrease of the incidence of meningococcal disease globally.
Keywords: Neisseria meningitidis, immunity and Neisseria meningitidis vaccines, epidemiology of Neisseria meningitidis.
Title: Global Epidemiology and Prevention of Neisseria Meningitidis
Author: SUJITHA V. K., SAMBHAJI S. PISAL, RAJEEV M. DHERE
International Journal of Healthcare Sciences
ISSN 2348-5728 (Online)
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