RESEARCH ARTICLE
Raising Awareness Among Immunization Programme Managers to the Potential Bias Resulting from the Application of Fixed Factors to Obtain Target Population Size Estimates
David W Brown1, *, Griffith Feeney2, Anthony H Burton3
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2012Volume: 5
First Page: 15
Last Page: 18
Publisher ID: TOPHJ-5-15
DOI: 10.2174/1874944501205010015
Article History:
Received Date: 18 /03 /2012Revision Received Date: 04 /05 /2012
Acceptance Date: 04 /05 /2012
Electronic publication date: 5/6/2012
Collection year: 2012
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
The challenges faced by many immunization programmes in understanding the size of the target population(s) for their work is seemingly well recognized, although not well documented. Despite the aid of adjustments for differences over time, inadequate information constitutes a major weakness of target population size estimates for many immunization programme managers. Because complete vital registration, the most reliable source for target population data, does not ex-ist in the majority of the low- and middle-income countries [1,2], immunization programmes must estimate the number of children in the target population (e.g., births, surviving infants) based on counts or estimates made by local programme staff or health workers or rely on projections from the latest census data [3].