Real World Effectiveness of Population-Based Roll Out of Human Papillomavirus Vaccination Against Rates of Genital Warts

Abstract

Nordic countries or elsewhere where similar registry linkage studies may be possible—such an analysis would indeed be relevant and informative in considering the total number of administered doses. HPV vaccination coverage rates in Sweden from 2006 to 2010 (approximately 4 years after introduction) were approximately 30% for both the youngest cohorts of girls and women aged 13 to 17 and 18 to 19 years, with relatively high completion rates of the three-dose series among those who initiated vaccination (approximately 80%). Sweden has an HPV vaccination registration system (SVEVAC) overseen by the Swedish Institute for Communicable Disease Control, as well as a national registry for drug prescriptions at the National Board of Health and Welfare. Because HPV vaccines must be prescribed by a health-care professional to be subsidized before implementation of a school-based program, Leval and colleagues likely captured close to 100% of the administered HPV vaccinations (at least in the group aged 13–17 years) through registry linkages when combining these two databases. Given these estimates of HPV vaccination initiation and that coverage rates were higher among residents whose parent(s) had higher education status, further efforts are needed to ensure broader HPV vaccination coverage of the entire Swedish female population, particularly for young girls at the highest future risk of cervical cancer—daughters of parents of relatively low educational