Vaccine’s dramatic success

The Scottish HPV immunisation programme started in 2008 and vaccination is now routinely offered to all secondary school girls, from age 11 to 12 years.

All 13 to 17-year-old girls were also offered HPV vaccine through a catch-up campaign. This programme finished in 2011.

The following year, the vaccine was changed from Cervarix to Gardasil. Gardasil also protects against HPV 16 and 18 but also HPV 6 and 11.

In 2017, a HPV vaccination programme was introduced for MSM, up to age 45 years. The vaccine is offered at sexual health clinics and administered in three doses.

A team of academics – from Strathclyde, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow Caledonian universities

– analysed vaccination and screening records for 140,000 women who went for their first cervical screen from 2008-16. Their study, published by the British Medical Journal last year, concluded Scotland’s HPV vaccination programme had led to “a dramatic reduction in pre-invasive cervical disease”. It said levels of cancercausing HPV in Scotland have dropped by almost 90% in young women and added the vaccine is “highly effective” and should greatly reduce the incidence of cervical cancer in the future. The HPV vaccination programme was extended to first-year secondary schoolboys from last year.

This is because evidence now shows the HPV vaccine helps protect both boys and girls from Hpv-related diseases, including head and neck cancers.