Young children are particularly affected by severe community-acquired infectious diseases. Specifically, pneumococcal diseases continue to be a major source of morbidity and mortality, with 300 000 deaths in children < 5 years of age each year globally. Pneumococcal conjugate vaccine implementation led to a major reduction of invasive disease incidence, but this benefit has been eroded by the emergence of non-vaccine pneumococcal serotypes, leading to an important resurgence of these diseases in many countries including France. Addressing this emerging global threat is crucial, and requires to better understand and anticipate this adaptive evolution.
Respiratory viruses, mainly respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), are also responsible for a major burden in very young children, being the first cause of hospitalization in pediatrics. Furthermore, a growing body of evidence suggest that respiratory viruses could trigger pediatric invasive bacterial infections, including pneumococcal diseases. Thus, better understanding these virus-bacteria interactions may pave the road for new public health interventions able to tackle these diseases.
In this context, the EPIC team is dedicated to three main research axes:
- Modelling invasive bacterial disease epidemiology, with a specific focus on modelling the ecological evolution of pneumococcal serotypes following human interventions, detangling factors underlying this phenomenon, and predicting the impact of new public health interventions, such as next generation vaccines,
- Modelling virus-bacteria interactions, with a specific focus on modelling the impact of public health interventions targeting respiratory viruses in preventing pneumococcal diseases in children,
- Improving therapeutic management of community-acquired severe infectious diseases in children, especially using quasi-experimental approaches to deal with the challenge of conducting randomized trials in pediatrics.
