H(uman)P(apilloma)V(irus)

HPV or Human Papillomavirus is the most common sexually transmitted disease according to the Planned Parenthood website. This disease is typically is not that bad and goes away on it’s on BUT the bad thing from it is that it can develop into cancer later on in life or even genital warts. Also, according to this website, HPV is so common that most people who have had sex have had HPV at one point but some people don’t show symptoms so they don’t even know that they had it. Which that idea honestly is scary to me because like so many things can be happening and you never know, you know? Not just for this disease but also other diseases that can be asymptomatic. But anyway, there is no cure for HPV buuuut there are things you can do to prevent it and lower its negative impacts. For example, you could get a vaccine that works against certain types of HPV. This is also why it’s important for women to go get regular pap smears as they are checking for the different abnormalities that HPV can cause in cervical cells which can lead cervical cancer in women.

Vaccine

According to an article I found from Science Daily, the CDC recommends that children under the age of 15 get two doses of the vaccine. But also in this article, they talk about a study they did where they tested the effectiveness of the vaccine. To do this, researchers looked at information of females from ages 9-26 who were either unvaccinated, vaccinated with one or with multiple doses and specifically within the time frame of January 2006 and June 2015. They analyzed 133,082. Which I know is a big number but honestly in studies we like big numbers because it gives a much larger range of subjects *couch* than just 12 *cough*. They split the women into different age groups. For the subjects less than 15, and 20 years and older, they did not find significant differences between the un/vaccinated groups in their risk of “preinvasive cervical disease”. So essentially in these age groups there wasn’t a difference between the vaccination groups and the effects of the vaccine (or none) on the chance of developing cervical cancer. But, they found that in the females 15-19 those who got vaccinated, no matter the amount of doses, showed lower rates of “preinvasive cervical disease” than those in the age group that were not vaccinated. The researchers stated “this study shows the impact of vaccinating at younger ages and its lasting long-term protection against cervical cancer.” Which I agree with them, just by the information I’ve given above it shows that, no matter the dosage, getting the vaccine at the age your doctors recommend is BETTER THAN NOTHING. Like this is an important study that proves something is better than nothing because some of these women only had one dose, or two, or three but all of them combined no matter how many doses had lower risks! Which……IS WHY YOU SHOULD VACCINATE YOUR KIDS. (:

Clinical Trials

So after reading a few of the clinical trials and not really understanding what any of them were saying or concluded…I did find a website that gave more of a general overview of how they tested the HPV vaccine before it was approved. So the original vaccine is named Gardasil. It was tested on more than 20,000 females and 4,000 males in different locations around the world. The trials were not set up to directly see if the vaccines prevented cervical cancer. Mainly because it’s not ethical to let the control group (the group that didn’t actually get the vaccine) get cervical cancer. Which like, totally agree because that would be super bad and super major law suits and just whew, not right. But they did find that the vaccine was almost 100% effective in preventing deformities in cervical cells which is caused by HPV types 16 and 18, which are the cancer causing types. Which is good because those were the signs that showed it was leading to cervical cancer. The vaccine also showed to be about 90% effective against HPV types that cause genital warts and lesions in males. Which when you think about is kind of weird or like kind of wrong, because did this mean that the control groups got the genital warts and abnormal cervical cells? And I mean maybe because it was under like strict controls to make sure things did not go worse but aren’t those side effects still bad. Oh another question I know it said that HPV certain types are cancer causing but is it cancer causing in every single case like no matter what? The reason I’m asking this question is because you know we said earlier that a lot of times it’s asymptomatic, could that still be the case for these specific types. But I know that a lot of work went into these studies as many lasted a few years. So to reiterate…..something is better than nothing whichh is why one should GET VACCINATED. (: