The HPV vaccination is intended to protect against cancer and is recommended for both girls and boys. Saxony-Anhalt did very well in the most recent nationwide comparisons. It is unclear how things went on in the Corona period.
Halle (dpa/sa) – Up to the Corona period, more and more girls and boys in Saxony-Anhalt had been vaccinated against human papilloma viruses (HPV). According to the latest figures for the 2019/20 school year, 41.2 percent of the sixth graders received a complete basic immunization, as the State Office for Consumer Protection (LAV) announced on request. 16.1 percent also received one of the two to three necessary doses. In the previous school year, 33.2 percent of the sixth graders were basic immunized.
The vaccination is intended to protect against cervical cancer and precancerous lesions in the anal area. According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), HPV infections are among the most common sexually transmitted infections. According to the RKI, around 6,250 women and around 1,600 men in Germany develop carcinomas caused by HPV infections every year.
The Standing Vaccination Commission has recommended vaccination for girls since 2007 and for boys since 2018. The vaccination rate for them in the 2019/20 school year was 7.6 percent, a year earlier only 2.6 percent of sixth graders had been immunized against HPV. The recommended vaccination age is 9 to 14 years.
The State Office for Consumer Protection cannot make any statements about the development of HPV vaccinations in the past two corona years. For capacity reasons, the health authorities did not collect any vaccination data in the third and sixth grades, but only for the children to be schooled.
The Robert Koch Institute has compared the vaccination rates of the federal states on the basis of, among other things, the billing data from the Associations of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians and identified Saxony-Anhalt as the frontrunner for 2019 with a vaccination rate of 66.9 percent among 15-year-old girls. With 76.8 percent, Jerichower Land was the nationwide pioneer among the districts and urban districts. Saxony-Anhalt achieved a vaccination rate of 71.3 percent among 18-year-olds. In no other state were there more.
And the RKI statistics also see Saxony-Anhalt ahead for the boys. The rate of complete HPV vaccinations was 10 percent among 15-year-old males, only Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania was slightly ahead at 10.1 percent. The vaccination rate for 18-year-olds was 3.7 percent. Several other East German federal states lay above it.
