Starting in September next year, male junior-high students in Taipei will be eligible for city government-funded vaccinations against the human papillomavirus (HPV), the Department of Health said yesterday.
The city has since 2018 been providing free HPV vaccines to female junior-high students in compliance with the Health Promotion Administration’s (HPA) policy, Taipei Department of Health Commissioner Chen Yen-yuan (陳彥元) said.
As the HPV vaccination rate for female junior-high students in 2021 reached 91 percent — comparable to the WHO’s target of having 90 percent of girls fully vaccinated by age 15 — the city decided to expand the eligibility to boys — the WHO’s recommended secondary target — next year, he said.
Photo: CNA
“Boys who have enrolled in Taipei’s junior-high schools this year would be eligible for the government-funded 9-valent HPV vaccine in September next year,” Chen said.
The health department, in cooperation with the education department and junior high schools, are to hold educational courses to inform the public about HPV prevention and vaccine safety, as well as distribute leaflets for parents to understand the importance and safety of the HPV vaccine, he said.
Lee Ping-ing (李秉穎), a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at National Taiwan University (NTU) Children’s Hospital, said that HPV infection is not only associated with higher risks of cervical cancer; men can also develop HPV-associated cancers of the mouth, throat, penis or anus, as well as genital warts.
It is a popular misconception that HPV can only be transmitted through sexual intercourse, he said, adding that it can also spread through oral sex, mouth-to-mouth, or other intimate contact.
Getting vaccinated is the most effective way to prevent HPV infection, he said.
Chen Tseng-cheng (陳贈成), a physician at NTU Hospital’s Department of Otolaryngology, said epidemiological data suggest that more than 80 percent of sexually active women and men would acquire at least one type of HPV infection in their lifetime, and the prevalence of HPV infection in men is higher than in women, so both genders are recommended to get the vaccine.
With about 10,000 boys enrolled in the city’s junior high schools this year, the expansion of the free vaccine program is expected to cost NT$20 million to NT$30 million (US$634,679 and US$952,018) each year, Chen Yen-yuan said.
Separately, asked about Taipei’s plans, HPA Director-General Wu Chao-chun (吳昭軍) said that if HPV vaccination for boys is feasible and other local governments can afford to, his agency would not oppose the policy, but it would not be implemented nationwide.
The WHO’s Global Strategy for the Elimination of Cervical Cancer as a Public Health Problem has set a “90-70-90” target for 2030, which is “90 percent of girls are fully vaccinated with HPV vaccine by age 15,” “70 percent of women are screened with a high-performance test by 35 and again at 45,” and “90 percent of women identified with cervical disease receive treatment.”
As the vaccination rate for female junior-high students has just reached more than 90 percent, the HPA needs time to observe the effectiveness of the policy before expanding vaccine eligibility to boys, he said.
NO-LIMITS PARTNERSHIP: ‘The bottom line’ is that if the US were to have a conflict with China or Russia it would likely open up a second front with the other, a US senator said Beijing and Moscow could cooperate in a conflict over Taiwan, the top US intelligence chief told the US Senate this week. “We see China and Russia, for the first time, exercising together in relation to Taiwan and recognizing that this is a place where China definitely wants Russia to be working with them, and we see no reason why they wouldn’t,” US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a US Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing on Thursday. US Senator Mike Rounds asked Haines about such a potential scenario. He also asked US Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has