Pertussis vaccines: WHO position paper – August 2015

Overview

In accordance with its mandate to provide guidance to Member States on health policy matters, WHO issues a series of regularly updated position papers on vaccines and combinations of vaccines against diseases that have an international public health impact.

These papers are concerned primarily with the use of vaccines in large-scale immunization programmes; they summarize essential background information on diseases and vaccines, and conclude with the current WHO position on the use of vaccines in the global context.

The papers are reviewed by external experts and WHO staff, and reviewed and endorsed by the WHO Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on immunization (SAGE) (http://www.who.int/immunization/sage/ en/). The GRADE methodology is used to systematically assess the quality of available evidence. A description of the process followed for the development of vaccine position papers is available at: http://www. who.int/immunization/position_papers/ position_paper_process.pdf