Implementation of routine HPV-vaccination in the National Immunisation Programme in The Netherlands is accompanied with monitoring and flanking research . HPV-vaccination using the bivalent vaccine was introduced in the National Immunisation Programme in 2010 for 12-year olds girls. A catch-up campaign was implemented for girls aged 13-16 year old in 2009. Cervical screening (from 2017 onwards on highrisk HPV) is offered to women aged 30 years and older.
Adequate monitoring of the effects of routine vaccination includes in general surveillance of vaccine uptake, safety, occurrence of the target disease, pathogen and serosurveillance. HPV vaccination differs from most other vaccine preventable diseases since the actual disease (e.g. cancer) caused by the virus takes many years. Therefore, occurrence of surrogate endpoints, including prevalent, incident and persistent HPV-infections , are currently studied in both cohorts of (un)vaccinated women and high risk groups (e.g. STI visitors) to enable measurement of early vaccine-effectiveness estimates.
Results on monitoring and flanking research on HPV-vaccination will be presented up to 7 years post-vaccine implementation.
Given our results on high vaccine-effectiveness against early endpoints and safety of the HPV-vaccination, efforts to increase vaccine uptake need to be emphasized.