Lack of sufficient information and the concerns raised by the church over the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine have hampered its administration in Murang’a county.
Only about 6,000 girls have been vaccinated in the county out of the targeted 18,504.
County nursing officer Salome Kimani said many parents were wary of the vaccine following statements made by the church that the vaccine could lead to severe side effects.
The misconceptions, Kimani said, resulted in a slow administration of the vaccine.
She said many residents know little about the vaccine and are unaware of its importance.
“The push and pull between the church and the government left many parents confused, and they chose to keep off even though the vaccine is free,” she said.
The government rolled out a vaccination programme in November last year targeting over 800,000 girls aged between 10 and 14 years to protect them from cervical cancer amid opposition of the church.
The Catholic Church voiced its concerns that the government had not conducted sufficient tests on the vaccine to ascertain its safety.
The Kenya Catholic Doctors Association (KCDA) claimed that the vaccine increases the chances of contracting cervical cancer.
It also claimed that girls targeted by the vaccination programme are too young to engage in sexual activity and therefore cannot contract HPV which is sexually transmitted and which is the primary cause of cervical cancer.
But while launching the programme, the President said cervical cancer was a leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the country and that the vaccine would reduce new cases.
Kimani said the county government was working with health promoters to spread awareness about the vaccine.
She said health officers had been going around schools sensitising girls about it and that they gave them notes asking for the consent of their parents.
Kimani said they realised that waiting for parents to take their daughters to health facilities to be vaccinated would not work.
“The outreach programme has borne fruit and the numbers are slowly increasing with time,” she said.
According to the Ministry of Health, the vaccine is said to have the capacity to reduce cancer cases by over 70 per cent.
The head of Vaccines and Immunization programme in the ministry Colins Tabu previously said the vaccine was safe. He said the country had been losing nine women to cancer everyday.
Tabu said that 115 countries had embraced the vaccine worldwide and had made it part of their immunisation programme.
Rwanda, in particular, he said, was among the first countries to take up the vaccine in 2006 and has been able to manage the disease.
Locally, the government carried out the vaccination programme in Kitui between 2013 and 2015 and vaccinated over 22,000 girls aged between nine and 11 years, which Tabu said resulted to 95 per cent evidence-based success.
Edited by A. Ndung'u
