If you could take a shot to protect yourself from cancer -
or your children from cancer - would you? Take cervical cancer, for instance.
Virtually all cervical cancers are caused by a virus - the human papillomavirus
more commonly known as
HPV. And where there's a virus,
there's the possibility of training the body to block it
by using vaccines. In other words:
cervical cancer could be prevented in principle
by a simple series shots. Which is exactly
what has happened. In 2009, the US Food and Drug Administration approved
two vaccines for protection against cervical cancer.
These were Cervarix - a vaccine that's approved for girls and women between the ages of
9 and 25
and works on two of the highest risk strains of HPV.
And Guardasil, a vaccine that's approved for use by females
and males between the ages of 9 and 26,
and protects against four of the highest risk strains of
HPV.
The development of these vaccines was great
news for public health, and prompted the US Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention to recommend that girls
and boys between the ages of 11 and 12 years old are
vaccinated against HPV.
But this advice raises some challenging questions:
why are children, why are boys, as well as girls,
and what - if any - are their risks of getting vaccinated?
CDC recommended vaccinating children
as this gives them the opportunity to develop immunity before they become
sexually active. Scientists are still studying
how long that immunity lasts - remember, the vaccine has
only been widely available since 2009 in the US.
But so far, research indicates that people who have been vaccinated
retain immunity for at least 5 years -
it could be a lot longer. And this immunity is
just as important for boys as it is for girls.
As well as reducing the chances of them infecting a partner with HPV when they
do become sexually active,
there are a number of particularly unpleasant cancers associated with HPV
that men get:
including cancer of the penis and
the rectum. And as if that wasn't enough,
the are growing concerns that many head and neck cancers in men
and women are also related to HPV.
So far, so good, but are the risks associated with taking the vaccine?
So far, research indicates that the health impacts the vaccine are extremely -
almost vanishingly - small. The vaccine
doesn't contain the virus itself, and so there's no chance of
unintentional infection. As with other vaccines, some people may feel dizzy or
sick, or
get a slight fever, or will have a sore arm after the jab.
And incredibly small number of people - somewhere around
one in three hundred thousand to one in 1,000,000 people - who are vaccinated
may get more seriously sick a few days after being vaccinated.
But - and this is a big but - because of the way these health impacts are reported,
there's no way of telling whether people have got sick
because of the vaccine, or because of something else that
just happened to occur around the same time.
And so, the chances are that the likely rates of vaccine-related complications
are
even lower than the statistics might suggest.
So back to that original question: if you could take a shot to prevent cancer,
would you? Of course, this is a personal decision, whether it's for you or your
children.
But considering that most people will be infected with HPV at some point in their
lives,
and thinking about the types of cancer this virus can cause,
for many people the benefits are far more likely to outweigh the downsides.
For more information on HPV vaccines,
please see the links in the blurb below. And don't forget to join the
conversation in the comments!