Date and Time
December 8, 2004
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM

Availability
Open to the public
No RSVP required

Speaker
Kimberly Thompson, MD - Associate Professor of Risk Analysis and Decision Science at the Harvard School of Public Health

Developing policies to ensure maintenance of a polio-free world after global eradication requires considering a number of complexities. These include making difficult choices about immunization, outbreak response, stockpile creation and management, surveillance, containment, management of chronic excretors, and investment in future research.

For this special seminar, Dr. Thompson -- associate professor of risk analysis and decision science and director of the Kids Risk Project at the Harvard School of Public Health -- will talk about her risk and decision analysis research related to polio. She will provide an overview of a collaborative effort to use economic tools to help inform decisions and evaluate the trade-offs (risks, costs and benefits) associated with different choices. She will discuss the key risks, including vaccine-derived polio viruses and vaccine associated paralytic polio with continued use of oral polio vaccine, the high costs of switching to inactivated polio vaccine, and the risks from cessation of vaccination that include potential future bioterrorism. By considering the different perspectives and conditions that apply to various decision makers, she will discuss the issues that may lead nations to differ in their preferences for risk management strategies. Professor Thompson's talk will also include a brief overview of the evolution of this project and some insights about future global health policy in what she calls "The Age of Risk Management."