Feasibility of a combined strategy of HPV vaccination and screening in Mexico: the FASTER-Tlalpan study experience

Abstract

There has been a noticeable shift in discussions about cervical cancer, moving from prevention to elimination. Interventions such as FASTER, human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination and HPV screening are innovative intervention strategies which can be utilized to begin a path to elimination. To explore the feasibility of the FASTER strategy, an evaluation was carried out in eight primary health-care centers within the Tlalpan Health-Jurisdiction of Mexico City between March 2017 and August 2018. A mixed methods approach was used to evaluate three components: infrastructure, patient acceptability, and health-care professionals' perceptions. This included checklists of requirements for the infrastructure rollout of FASTER and interviews with women and health-care professionals. Nearly all (93%) of the 3,474 women aged 25-45 years accepted HPV vaccination as part of a combined vaccination and screening program. The main reason for acceptance was prevention, while having doubts about the vaccine's benefits was the main reason for refusal. Most of the 24 health-care professionals had a positive opinion toward HPV vaccination and identified the need to increase dissemination, inform the population clearly and concisely and currently extend the age range for vaccination. The evaluation of eight primary health-care centers showed they had the necessary infrastructure for the development of a joint HPV prevention strategy, but many centers required improvements to become more efficient. Together these findings suggest that although HPV vaccine acceptance was high, there is the need to increase education and awareness among potential vaccine recipients and health-care professionals to implement the FASTER strategy.

HPV vaccine acceptance in Latin America and the Caribbean: a systematic review and meta-analysis

“…Out of the 24 articles included in this study, 23 were cross-sectional studies [18][19][20][21][22][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41], and 1 was a cohort study [23]. A total of 14,466 participants were included.…”

There’s Much Yet to be Done: Diverse Perspectives on HPV Vaccination

“…83 Also in this section, there is an article involving evaluation of the feasibility of using a combined approach to HPV vaccination and screening (also known as FASTER) in Mexico. 84 The final article in this section reports on the important effort to overcome barriers to implementation in low-and middle-income countries related to the need for continuous refrigeration during transport. Using a mouse model, they show immunogenicity and protective efficacy of the 9-valent vaccine after it had undergone a spray drying and stabilizing process.…”