Cultural barriers still stand in the way of HPV vaccine uptake

Enlarge / The HPV vaccine is often delivered along with sex education. (credit: Pan American Health Organization / Flickr)
Every year, nearly 34,000 cases of cancer in the US can be attributed to HPV, the human papillomavirus. The CDC estimates that vaccination could prevent around 93 percent of those cancers. Yet HPV vaccination rates are abysmal: only half of the teenagers in the US were fully vaccinated in 2017.
Cultural barriers play a role in that low rate. Vaccinating pre-teens against a sexually transmitted infection has had parents concerned that that this would encourage their kids to have sex sooner, with more partners, or without protection or birth control. And vaccine rates vary across different social and cultural groups: for instance, rural teenagers are less likely to be vaccinated than urban ones.
Two recent studies explore different facets of the cultural barriers standing in the way of better HPV vaccine uptake. The first, a paper published last month in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, looks at the data on whether the vaccine encourages riskier sexual behavior and finds no evidence that it does. And the second, an early draft of a paper presented at an American Association for Cancer Research meeting this week, reports the results of a culturally-targeted intervention aiming to increase vaccine uptake among low-income Chinese Americans.
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