Prevalence of oral human papillomavirus infection in African countries: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This meta-analysis aimed to provide pooled overall prevalence estimates of oral human papillomavirus (HPV) infection in Africa. A literature search for cross-sectional studies was conducted until January 2025. The Newcastle-Ottawa Scale assessed the methodological quality. Random-effects model estimated the pooled prevalence of oral HPV infection. Sub-group analyses were conducted using study characteristics as covariates. Thirty-three studies involving 4.607 participants from 9 countries were included. Prevalence of oral HPV infection ranged between 0% to 95.1%, with a pooled overall estimate of 15.8%. The studies exhibited considerable heterogeneity (I2 = 99.3%). Subgroup analyses revealed the highest prevalence among participants with head and neck cancer (19.9%), from sub-Saharan area (19.2%), female (17.3%), moderate-low-quality studies (16.7%), and in HIV-positive (5.8%). High-quality studies with an accurate collection of the risk factors are needed for tailoring programs and health-care policies to prevent and control oral HPV infection and associated diseases.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".