Public Health Communications Collaborative

Vaccination is one of the great achievements of the 20th century, yet persistent public health problems include inadequate, delayed, and unstable vaccination uptake. Psychology offers three general propositions for understanding and intervening to increase uptake where vaccines are available and affordable. The first proposition is that thoughts and feelings can motivate getting vaccinated. Hundreds of studies have shown that risk beliefs and anticipated regret about infectious disease correlate reliably with getting vaccinated; low confidence in…

The EPIC study collected data on routine infant immunization costs from Benin, Ghana, Honduras, Moldova, Uganda, Zambia, using a standardized approach. The authors estimated how costs were distributed across budget categories and programmatic activities, and investigated how the cost structure of immunization sites varied by country and site characteristics. For each country, the economic costs of infant immunization were estimated by administrative level, budget category, and programmatic activity from a program perspective. Regression models were…

This report from the World Bank is the fourth volume of the Disease Control Priorities, Third Edition (DCP3) series. It discusses the prevalence of mental, neurological, and substance use disorders, as well as the associated disability and premature mortality that can accompany them. Despite the high social and economic burden of these diseases on individuals, families, and communities, these disorders have been systematically neglected, especially in low- and middle-income countries, and there has been limited…