Abstract: Objective To examine prevalent characteristics of human papillomavirus(HPV) infection and cervical lesions among rural women in 5 counties of Anhui province for making cervical cancer prevention and treatment strategies.Methods Totally 21078 rural women aged 35-64 years were recruited in 5 counties of Anhui province with stratified cluster sampling in 2014.First, primary screening for high risk and high risk subtype HPV infection were screened among the women selected.Then cervical cytology test, vaginal examination, pathology detection, and other examination were further conducted among the participants with positive or suspected results of the primary screening.HPV infection status and reults of clinical and pathological examination were analyzed with SPSS 16.0.Results The detection rate of HPV infection was 8.01%in the women and the most prevalent infection type was HPV16(18.41%) among the HPV positive women.Significant regional difference in both the detection rate(from 6.06%to 9.43%) and the infection ratio of the 6 common HPV strains were observed among the 5 counties.The HPV detection rate increased with the increment of age among the women(P<0.05), with the lowest(6.90%) and the highest(8.94%) among the women at the ages of 35-39 and 55-65 years.The sensitivity and positive predictive value of HPV detection for the identification of cervical lesions were 98.44% and 89.74%, respectively.The sensitivity and negative predictive value of HPV detection for both the identification of cervical cancer and precancerous lesions were 100%.The incidences of cervical cancer and precancerous lesions were 488.66/100000 among all the women surveyed and the positive rate of cervical cancer and precancerous lesions was 9.18%in the women positive to HPV.Conclusion There is a significant regional difference in the detection rate of HPV infection and the detection rate increases with the increment of age among the women from the 5 counties of Anhui province.HPV detection is helpful for early prevention and intervention of early cervical lesions.