Persuasion via Performance: Toward a Handbook for Youth to Develop Content that Promotes HPV Vaccination.

Slightly over half of American teens are fully vaccinated against the human papillomavirus, or HPV. The vaccine is protective against 90% of cancers caused by HPV, including cancers of the vagina, vulva, and cervix in women, the penis in men, and cancers of the throat and anus in both men and women. While HPV vaccination rates are on the rise, rural areas lag significantly behind. There are several reasons why, and there are multiple strategies that can increase vaccination rates. This article discusses the process of creating a writer's handbook to enable youth writers and producers to create provaccination, short-form dramatic stories in podcast format, and to distribute and promote them via social media to their peers. The objective is to prompt students to get their HPV vaccination. The article concludes with examples that will be part of this handbook.

A Peer-Based Strategy to Overcome HPV Vaccination Inequities in Rural Communities: A Physical Distancing-Compliant Approach.

The human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine is the world's first proven and effective vaccine to prevent cancers in males and females when administered pre-exposure. Like most of the US, barely half of Vermont teens are up-to-date with the vaccination, with comparable deficits in New Hampshire and Maine. The rates for HPV vaccine initiation and completion are as low as 33% in rural New England. Consequently, there is a compelling responsibility to communicate its importance to unvaccinated teenagers before their risk for infection increases. Messaging in rural areas promoting HPV vaccination is compromised by community-based characteristics that include access to appropriate medical care, poor media coverage, parental and peer influence, and skepticism of science and medicine. Current strategies are predominantly passive access to literature and Internet-based information. Evidence indicates that performance-based messaging can clarify the importance of HPV vaccination to teenagers and their parents in rural areas. Increased HPV vaccination will significantly contribute to the prevention of a broadening spectrum of cancers. Reducing rurality-based inequities is a public health priority. Development of a performance-based peer-communication intervention can capture a window of opportunity to provide increasingly effective and sustained HPV protection. An effective approach can be partnering rural schools and regional health teams with a program that is nimble and scalable to respond to public health policies and practices compliant with COVID-19 pandemic-related modifications on physical distancing and interacting in the foreseeable future.