Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) infection causes over 99% of cervical cancer and detection of HPV types might identify
women at risk of development or progression of cervical cancer. This study was aimed at determining the phylogenetic
relationship between the HPV strains isolated and identified. Cervical swabs were collected from the cervix
and DNA was obtained by extraction and then used to identify HPV types by PCR method using consensus primer
sets MY09/MY11 and GP5+/GP6+. A phylogenetic study was also carried out to determine the genetic association between
strains discovered using CLUSTALW on Unipro Ugene software. All HPV isolated in this study showed 80-99%
nucleotide identity with types related to the same species. The phylogenetic tree was constructed using 15 isolates
from this study against 45 reference strains selected from NCBI data based on percentage similarity. Mutation was
detected in HPV 6 and HPV 18 strain isolated in the study. Based on the results there is a need to increase the level of
surveillance on females at risk of cervical cancer in this environment since a significant proportion of highly oncogenic
strains with a high tendency to transform into malignancy were observed in this study. The results from this study also
contributed to the epidemiological data on the distribution of HPV within this region.
