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Background: Vaccination during pregnancy is an important healthcare intervention for safeguarding the health of the mother and their infants. Ethnic disparities in recruitment to vaccine research studies during pregnancy potentially contribute to health inequalities. The aim of the current study was to explore the barriers and enablers influencing the willingness of pregnant women from ethnic minority backgrounds to participate in vaccine research studies., Methods and Findings: Semi-structured qualitative online interviews were conducted with 23 pregnant women from diverse ethnic backgrounds in the UK. Interviews were transcribed verbatim, and thematically analysed. Our findings suggest that participants perceived vaccines and vaccine research, in principle, to be beneficial to the individual and to society, and understood the value of vaccination in mitigating severity of disease and protecting the health of mothers and their infants. Apprehension over the safety of vaccination in pregnancy was common and reduced willingness to participate. For those that decided to participate in vaccine trials in pregnancy, this was seen as an act of solidarity, a way to contribute to a collective responsibility for the public health of the community. Personal and community connections and representation-seeing people from their own communities represented in in the recruitment process shapped decisions about vaccine trial participating. Trust and mistrust in health systems, shaped by past experiences of interacting with healthcare professionals were likely to inform whether they would consider participating. Practical considerations such as excessive time commitments related to study procedures, travel and organising childcare were barrier to participation. The level of invasiveness of trial procedures were also a concern, although increased monitoring during the trial was seen as a potential benefit, mitigating some safety concerns., Conclusions: Our study reinforcing previously identified barriers to vaccine participation among pregnant women from diverse ethnic communities. This study underlines the need to develop tailored interventions that focus on fostering trust with the aid of community engagement to understand cultural contexts, establishing authentic representation, and address practical considerations, to contribute to enhancing vaccine trial participation in pregnancy in those from diverse ethnic communities., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2024 Youssef et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Objective: The spectrum of diseases caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae and non-typeable Haemophilus influenzae (NTHi) represents a large burden on healthcare systems around the world. Meningitis, bacteraemia, community-acquired pneumonia (CAP), and acute otitis media (AOM) are vaccine-preventable infectious diseases that can have severe consequences. The health economic model presented here is intended to estimate the clinical and economic impact of vaccinating birth cohorts in Canada and the UK with the 10-valent, pneumococcal non-typeable Haemophilus influenzae protein D conjugate vaccine (PHiD-CV) compared with the newly licensed 13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV-13)., Methods: The model described herein is a Markov cohort model built to simulate the epidemiological burden of pneumococcal- and NTHi-related diseases within birth cohorts in the UK and Canada. Base-case assumptions include estimates of vaccine efficacy and NTHi infection rates that are based on published literature., Results: The model predicts that the two vaccines will provide a broadly similar impact on all-cause invasive disease and CAP under base-case assumptions. However, PHiD-CV is expected to provide a substantially greater reduction in AOM compared with PCV-13, offering additional savings of Canadian $9.0 million and £4.9 million in discounted direct medical costs in Canada and the UK, respectively., Limitations: The main limitations of the study are the difficulties in modelling indirect vaccine effects (herd effect and serotype replacement), the absence of PHiD-CV- and PCV-13-specific efficacy data and a lack of comprehensive NTHi surveillance data. Additional limitations relate to the fact that the transmission dynamics of pneumococcal serotypes have not been modelled, nor has antibiotic resistance been accounted for in this paper., Conclusion: This cost-effectiveness analysis suggests that, in Canada and the UK, PHiD-CV's potential to protect against NTHi infections could provide a greater impact on overall disease burden than the additional serotypes contained in PCV-13.

This article presents estimates of the minority ethnic populations of Great Britain in 2000 and describes the regional distributions of the different groups. It also discusses changes in the sizes of the different minority ethnic populations during the 1990s. The paper provides information on some key demographic features of these populations at the end of the 1990s--age and sex structures, proportions born in the United Kingdom and whether children lived with their natural parents.

All the scheduled Topic Statistics Population Statistics reports from the 1991 Census are now published. This article illustrates the Census range of statistics contained in these reports, making some comparisons with results from the 1981 Census for those topics where there are comparable figures.