Abstract
Hepatitis B (HBV) is one of the most common infectious diseases, with a worldwide annual incidence of over 250 million people. About one-third of the cases are in China. While China made significant efforts to implement a nationwide HBV vaccination program for newborns, a significant number of susceptible adults and teens remain. In this paper, we analyze a game-theoretical model of HBV dynamics that incorporates government-provided vaccination at birth coupled with voluntary vaccinations of susceptible adults and teens. We show that the optimal voluntary vaccination brings the disease incidence to very low levels. This result is robust and, in particular, due to a high HBV treatment cost, essentially independent from the vaccine cost.
Highlights
This statistic persists despite the availability of highly effective hepatitis B virus (HBV) vaccines and the implementation of widespread vaccination programs beginning in the 1980s [4]
Infection with hepatitis B leads to chronic and severe liver disease, cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), which account for the vast majority of HBV-related deaths [8,9]
We investigated the impact of individual decisions for or against vaccination by applying the game-theoretic approach [32] to an epidemiological model of [12]
Summary
An estimated 250 to 350 million people are infected with hepatitis B virus (HBV), and 600 to 800 thousand will die from complications of the disease each year [1,2,3]. This statistic persists despite the availability of highly effective HBV vaccines and the implementation of widespread vaccination programs beginning in the 1980s [4]. The prevalence of HBV infection varies throughout the world and is endemic in many of the most populous regions, including China, Southeast Asia, and parts of Africa and the Middle. Infection with hepatitis B leads to chronic and severe liver disease, cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), which account for the vast majority of HBV-related deaths [8,9]
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