Before starting I’d like to make it clear that the main point of this article is NOT to make a judgment call on whether some one should or shouldn’t get a meningitis vaccine. This is nothing more than an example I found, of a study that I believe is incomplete.
The bacterial meningitis vaccine is effective at reducing bacterial meningitis, according to an article named “Bacterial Meningitis in the United States in 1995″ The New England Journal of Medicine. The article is quite convincing to me in its data, however I think some information on whether it was a “success or failure” is absent.
The article stats an estimation of 5755 bacterial meningitis were caused by five pathogens in the United States in 1995, this is compared to 12,920 cases in 1986. According to this, the fact that there was a greater than 50% drop in cases is extremely convincing.
However information on the number of deaths in 1986 and 1995 is not well presented. A graph stats that there were 18 cased of Haemophilus influenza in 1995 with a case fatality rate of 6%. I do not understand how or why it was listed as a percent since there must have been one casualty of the 18 cases to create a 5.5% fatality rate, and it might be more useful to just stating the number of deaths instead of the fatality rate. As for 1986, no information was present regarding deaths.
On top of that, the lack of information putting the study into context bothers me. The article does not state any sort of overall affection the vaccine might have, or the costs of producing it (not only regarding money but also time investment, production capabilities and many more factors). There are no statistics listed as to deaths or other health related information of the patient that were given the vaccine. An exaggerated and extremely unlikely example of why I believe this information is important would be if the vaccine killed the patient its self, leaving only the individuals alive that might be strong enough to survive meningitis. The study specifies that they are only telling us about the patients that were affected by meningitis.
I believe that this study does prove that the bacterial meningitis vaccines are important and beneficial. I am however concerned with the lack of context based data in the article. I would be hesitant on calling it a “success” without it, unless you are merely concerned with the cases of meningitis, in which case, I’d call it a success.