Background The pathogenic and oncogenic roles of papillomavirus (HPV) infections have been documented and shown to occur in women as well as in men. While other countries have already extended their vaccination guidelines to include boys, in 2019 the French National Authority for Health validated implementation of HPV vaccination in the 2020 vaccination schedule. There is, however, a climate of distrust in regard to vaccination in France, and there have been few studies to date regarding the acceptability of HPV vaccination in boys in France. The aim of this study was, therefore, to evaluate the acceptability of extending the recommendations for HPV vaccination in men, among middle and high school students and their parents. Methods Our study (HPVac) was a prospective, multicenter, departmental, and descriptive survey applied to a sample of male middle and high school students attending schools in the Loire-Atlantique department and their parents. It took place from January 2017 to January 2018. Results We analyzed the information obtained from 127 parent questionnaires and 145 children questionnaires. In terms of acceptability, 36.6% (n = 53) of the children and 37.8% (n = 48) of the parents were in favour of being vaccinated or of having their children vaccinated against HPV (51.7% (n = 75) and 50.4% (n = 64), respectively, were undecided). The perception of a risk stemming from HPV infection was positively associated with acceptability of the HPV vaccine. Being against vaccines in general, being discouraged by their parents, parents thinking that their child is not at risk, and the belief that the vaccine is not mandatory were arguments cited and significantly associated with a willingness to be vaccinated.

The last decades have brought significant improvements in materials, microfabrication, manufacturing processes, microelectronic fabrication, optical design tools and microprocessing power. It has allowed the development of novel types and designs of electro-optical (EO) military systems having, among others, the following added capabilities: wide field of view, extended spectral response, multifunction devices, image fusion and embedded image processing. Meanwhile, the international standards that regulate the testing and evaluation of EO systems, developed in the 1990s, have not been updated to include those new capabilities that are important on the battlefield. As a result, those standards are often no longer suitable to characterize current state-of-art EO systems and to support major military EO systems acquisition projects. In this paper, we present an overview of some novel testing capabilities developed over the last decade at DRDC-Valcartier Research Centre that aim at comparing, in a controlled environment, the performance and limitations of EO military systems under different representative operational conditions. Those novel testing capabilities do not aim at replacing standard testing procedures, but rather at complementing them. Methodologies developed to test thermal imagers, wide-field-of-view night vision google, image intensifier tubes and lasers are described.

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