Dr. Colette Bonner:

I wanted to return to Deputy O'Connell's point on the chickenpox vaccine. The National Immunisation Advisory Committee, NIAC, makes recommendations to the Department of Health on vaccines. That is one that we have not had an official advice about yet. We have not gone through any process regarding that yet.

On HPV for boys, we are looking at the possibility of extending the programme to boys and the Department of Health has asked HIQA to do a health technology assessment in order to look at the effectiveness and the cost-effectiveness of introducing that particular programme. That health technology assessment has commenced and we hope to have a decision on that in September 2018. It is quite a long process because it involves quite a lot of modelling and so on. In the meantime, our focus is to increase the rates of HPV vaccination in girls.