Time & room tbc. Light refreshments will be provided. See the Bristol Medical School's intranet site for further details. 

The African meningitis belt stretches from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east. This region experiences periodic but irregular epidemics of meningococcal meningitis. The largest recorded outbreak in 1996 resulted in 250,000 cases and 25,000 deaths. This catalysed a global effort to develop an affordable meningococcal conjugate vaccine against serogroup A, the major cause of epidemics. In this talk I will describe our efforts to develop mathematical models to describe the unusual epidemiology of meningitis in Africa and subsequently to model the impact of vaccination.