Publications

Human papillomavirus (HPV) infection is a sexually transmitted infection. HPV vaccine since its first licensure in2006 has proven to be safe, highly immunogenic, and induces strong direct and indirect protection against HPV andits sequelae. The study was designed to determine the socio-demographic, health care, and parental factors associatedwith human papillomavirus vaccine uptake amongst girls aged 9-14 years. The study was a cross-sectional studyemploying a simple random sampling method and a total of 364 girls were interviewed following the set criteriausing questionnaire data. Data were cleaned, coded, and analyzed using SPSS version 22.0. Findings were presentedas frequencies, percentages, odd ratios, and p-values using univariate, bivariate, and multivariate analysis. From thestudy, statistically significant sociodemographic factors such as age (p=0.0000), schooling status (p=0.0000), levelof education (p=0.007442), attitudes towards the HPV vaccine (p=0.005175), Receiving vaccine doses from differentvaccination sites (p=0.0000), and Ethnicity (p=0.0000), healthcare factors such as outreaches in communities(p=0.0000), information received (p=0.0000), encouragement from health workers (p=0.0000), availability ofvaccines (p=0.0000) and parental factors such as knowledge about HPV vaccine(p=0.001), parental hesitancy(p<0.001), level of education (p=0.0000), social economic status (p=0.001), attitudes towards HPV vaccine,(p=0.0000) and HPV vaccine awareness (p=0.0000) were found statistically associated with HPV vaccine uptakeamongst girls aged 9-14 years. From the study findings, the study variables such as sociodemographic, and healthrelatedfactors were found to be statistically associated with HPV vaccine uptake amongst girls aged 9-14 years.Therefore, effort should be brought to all levels of intervention so that HPV uptake is taken into consideration if theneed for good health among girls needs to be achieved.