| dc.description.abstract | Norway has one of the highest rates of pertussis in Europe; while this may be due in part to higher rates of reporting, it is still a serious disease if contracted by infants. Norway’s current vaccination program recommends the first pertussis vaccine at 3 months of age, leaving infants vulnerable for those first few months. One possible solution is providing expecting mothers a booster vaccine during their third trimester of pregnancy; the antibodies pass through to the infant and can protect it during the interim between birth and receipt of the first vaccine in the current program. The objective of this analysis was to determine the cost-efficiency of maternal vaccination in the Norwegian context. A decision tree and Markov model were created to predict the QALY and cost outcomes of the current strategy and the maternal vaccination comparator. One-way, multi-way, and probabilistic sensitivity analyses were conducted to address varying risk and uncertainty within the model. The current program was estimated to cost 7,352,328 NOK with an infant cohort of 59,273; the maternal vaccination strategy cost 17,627,344 NOK and resulted in a gain of 3.67 QALYs over the current program. The ICER was calculated as 2,802,947 NOK per QALY gained. At an assumed threshold of 800,000 NOK, the maternal vaccination strategy was therefore not cost-effective. | eng |