Elsevier

Vaccine

Volume 30, Issue 6, 1 February 2012, Pages 995-997
Vaccine

Short communication
Influenza vaccination coverage one year after the A(H1N1) influenza pandemic, France, 2010–2011

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.vaccine.2011.12.011Get rights and content

Abstract

We report influenza vaccination coverage in target groups for the 2010–2011 influenza season, one year after the A(H1N1) pandemic. Data were collected through a one-stage cross-sectional national random telephone survey conducted in January 2011 among a sample of the population of mainland France connected to a land telephone line. Influenza vaccination coverage was below 75%, ranging from 28% for health professionals to 71% in the “65+” group with an underlying condition. Coverage was higher in the “65+” compared to the “<65” with an underlying condition. It was not significantly lower compared to the previous season. Our results do not suggest that the controversies related to the pandemic vaccination campaign of 2009–2010 have had a negative impact on subsequent seasonal influenza vaccination coverage.

Highlights

► We measured influenza vaccine coverage for the 2010–2011 season. ► Coverage was not lower in any target group compared to the previous season. ► This suggests no impact of the pandemic controversies on subsequent coverage.

Introduction

The French influenza vaccination strategy targets three main at risk groups: persons aged 65 years old or above (“65+”), persons below 65 years of age with certain underlying chronic conditions (“<65”) and health professionals [1]. Each autumn, an individual vaccination voucher is sent by the various Social Security Schemes (SSS) to those three at risk populations. The voucher allows the recipient to get vaccinated for free. The voucher is then returned to the SSS by the pharmacist who delivered the vaccine in order to get refunded. At the end of each season, each of the 3 main SSS estimates vaccine uptake in the “65+” and “<65” groups based on the voucher return rates [2]. Vaccination coverage (VC) is usually monitored through the data provided by the Caisse nationale de l’assurance maladie des travailleurs salaries (CnamTS), the main SSS which covers about 85% of the French population. They have constantly shown vaccine uptakes below the target level of 75% [2].

The 2009–2010 vaccination campaign against A(H1N1) pandemic influenza resulted in a A(H1N1) VC of 8% in France, probably reflecting a public perception of a low risk from the disease as well as the negative impact of controversies concerning the safety and quality of the pandemic vaccines [3]. This apparent lack of confidence in the A(H1N1) vaccine may have lead to a decrease in seasonal vaccination coverage the following season, especially considering that the trivalent vaccine recommended for the 2010–2011 season included the A(H1N1)2009pdm pandemic strain. We therefore conducted a survey in order to estimate seasonal influenza VC for the 2010–2011 season. The survey began on January 3, 2011 (and ended on January 28), about three months after the launch of the vaccination campaign on September 23, 2010. Unpublished weekly figures from the CNAMTS show that the number of persons that receive the influenza vaccination after the end of December is close to zero. This survey would allow producing earlier estimates than those yielded by the CNAMTS (final figures are only released well after the end of the influenza season) and therefore would allow an early warning of health authorities in case of insufficient coverage. A second objective of the survey was to produce vaccination coverage estimates in the “health professionals” and “65+” with underlying condition groups, in which estimations are not performed by the CNAMTS.

Section snippets

Materials and methods

We conducted a one-stage random cross-sectional national telephone survey in January 2011 among a representative sample of households of mainland France connected to a land telephone line, representing more than 85% of French households. Clearance to perform this survey was obtained from the French Data Protection Authority (Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés). The sampling frame was made of 70,000 telephone numbers possibly attributed to a telephone subscriber, divided into

Results

Six lots were eventually used, corresponding to 30,000 numbers dialled, of which 3815 households could be contacted (Fig. 1). Refusal rate was 18% (702/3815), 1078 persons with a full interview completed were eventually included in the survey and analysed (“65+” with underlying condition: 262; “65+” without underlying condition: 396; “<65” with underlying condition: 222; health professionals: 198). Main reasons for refusal were “not interested by the survey” (45%), “usually do not respond to

Discussion

Our survey was conducted in a random sample and should be representative of mainland France households connected to a land telephone line. Two groups were however excluded from the survey. We did not include persons with mobile phones only, since they could not be reached in the absence of available database. The exclusion of this group is unlikely to have affected significantly our estimates since they are usually young persons not targeted by influenza vaccination. More importantly, our

Acknowledgements

We thank all individuals interviewed and the team of interviewers for their work, and Mrs. Patricia Schultz, M. Christophe David and Mrs. Elisabeth Diez at Institut Ipsos for their collaboration and availability during all the steps of the survey. We thank CnamTS General Director Frédéric Van Roekeghem for providing data on voucher return rates. We thank Christine Saura (Institut de veille sanitaire) for reviewing the final version of this article.

Conflicts of interest: The authors declare that

References (7)

There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

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