Abstract

Invasive meningococcal disease is challenging for public health, mainly when it manifests with sudden changes in incidence, serogroups and hypervirulent clones that spread in the population, causing great alarm due to its sequelae and often fatal course, a situation that occurred in Chile, starting at week 26 of the year 2012. To face this scenario, an organization of multidisciplinary teams was required, called W-135 Action Plan in Chile, which included sanitary alerts, education, reinforcement of the epidemiological surveillance of suspicious cases, immediate diagnosis through state-of-the-art techniques, blocking of contacts, communication plans, and, from the 42nd week, ON the vaccination campaign was started for children aged from 9-months-old to less than 5 years of age. The vaccination strategy had a great impact on the decrease in incidence (1.3 to 0.1/100,000) and case fatality rate in the vaccinated population (23% to 0%), with a high safety profile, leading to its subsequent inclusion in the national immunization program. The ability to develop molecular, clinical and epidemiological studies allowed us to better understand the situation, supporting public health policy decisions for its control. The W-135 Action Plan implemented by the Ministry of Health in Chile, to manage the outbreak of meningococcal disease by Neisseria meningitidis serogroup W, demonstrated that the coordination of these efforts, through an organized Action Plan, allows the implementation of campaigns at the national level achieving high coverage of risk populations in short periods of time, generating a positive impact on the health of the population.