Taiwan to get HPV vaccine free for male middle school students from September...What about Korea?
Aug 13, 2025
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According to local media such as the Free Times, Taiwan's National Health Ministry will vaccinate all second graders of middle school who will start school in September. A total of 213,000 students, including about 110,000 male students and 103,000 female students, will be inoculated for three months from September to December.
Taiwan's health authorities, who have been vaccinating middle school girls for free since 2018, predicted that the current vaccination rate has already reached 88.7% and will exceed 90% by the end of this year.
Meanwhile, HPV is a sexually transmitted sexually transmitted disease, and cancers that can be caught by the HPV virus are penile cancer and head and neck cancer for men, anal cancer, and cervical cancer, vulva cancer, and vaginal cancer for women. It is known that 90% of cervical cancer and 70% of anal genital cancer and palate cancer are caused by HPV infection.
The HPV vaccine is a vaccine that can prevent related cancers, and it is known to be most effective in adolescence. It is a vaccine that is recognized for its safety in 141 countries around the world, including 37 out of 38 countries that have joined the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and is effective in preventing more than 90% of cervical cancer caused by HPV infection.
Meanwhile, in Korea, there is a movement to expand the vaccination target to men. Rep. Kim Mi-ae (Power of the People), a member of the National Assembly's Health and Welfare Committee, recently proposed a partial amendment to the Act on the Prevention and Management of Infectious Diseases, which includes expanding the HPV national vaccination target to everyone under the age of 26, regardless of gender. Currently, bivalent or tetravalent vaccinations are supported only for female adolescents aged 12 to 17 and low-income women aged 18 to 26. According to data from the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released in September last year, the completion rate of the first HPV vaccine for girls born in 2011 was 79.2%, while that of boys was 0.2%.
This article was translated by Naver AI translator.
