Genital warts vaccination to be offered to schoolgirls (UK)

[alp227]

Source: The Guardian

Schoolgirls across the UK will be offered immunisation against genital warts, one of the most common sexually transmitted infections, in a move welcomed by doctors.

It will expand the existing vaccination against cervical cancer for 12- and 13-year-olds.

The change will take place at the start of the next school year in August and September 2012. All 12- and 13-year-old schoolgirls will be offered a vaccine called Gardasil, which protects against the two strains of the human papilloma virus (HPV) that cause 70% of cervical cancers and also two other strains that produce 90% of genital warts.

It will replace Cervarix, which has been used since immunisation began in 2008 but only offers protection against cervical cancer.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/nov/24/genital-warts-vaccination-offered-schoolgirls

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Before anyone trolls that girls should just stay chaste until marriage and that there's a big conspiracy by Big Pharma, did abstinence really work out in America?

[uppityperson]

1. Good for them. Give them the choice.

[lbrtbell]

2. Sex has been around since the dawn of time

Trust Big Pharma to profit from it.

Any day now, I expect them to come up with a "vaccine" that will stop teens from talking back to their parents.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

7. What an idiotic statement.

Yeah, because talking back is the same as oral cancer, anal cancer, genital warts and cervical cancer.

[MayHamm]

3. I will never support this until they include schoolboys.

My opinion is that girls catch this from boys, not other girls. Boys lives are also devastated when they contract an incurable disease. Why are they not interested in protecting boys from something that will change their life also? I do not understand and I do not agree.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. This is cost effective

This will also eliminate nearly all cases of genital in boys/men as well, over time, because they mainly have sex with girls/women their own age. From the article:

Dr Peter Greenhouse of the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV said the organisation was delighted by the news. He said that if 70% of girls continued to be immunised against HPV, "we should expect to see genital wart infections start to reduce in teenage girls within five years, and slightly later in boys.

"If we continue to vaccinate just 70% of 12- to-13 year-old girls, we can predict that genital warts should be eradicated in heterosexual women and men within 20 years, through the herd immunity effect," he added.

Greenhouse said Gardasil should be made available to young gay men on their first visit to a sexual health clinic in order to protect them against anal and oral cancers as well as genital warts.

The leading British AIDS charity welcomes it, but does also want it given to all boys. It is a fairly expensive vaccine, so I think they're taking the route that stops the vast majority of infections in both sexes, immunises the one sex that is in danger of a common fatal cancer, and keeps the price down. To say that it must be both sexes or neither seems silly to me.

[MayHamm]

5. What does cost have to do with not protecting boys?

$360 plus three office visits. Good for girls but not worth it for boys who may end up with a years long nasty condition?

An iPad costs more than the vaccine. So does a laptop, a flat screen, three college textbooks, what else? It's not expensive. A hundred (or a thousand) medicines cost more than that monthly for those who need them.

This vaccine only protects girls where it is mandated and nothing protects boys who don't stay in their one small town. If you want to rid HPV vaccinate boys, too.

[NoodleyAppendage]

6. Too true. HPV is a major cause of head/neck cancer in males.

HPV vaccines should be mandatory for all children, regardless of gender. Essentially the vaccine is a cancer cure, and we don't have many of those these days.

J

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. If you check, you'll see we're not buying iPads, laptops or flat screens for each child either

$360 + 3 visits (say £300 in total) for every boy in an age group is a significant expense - perhaps 350,000 of them, so about £100 million per year. Healthcare is about balancing the incremental cost of treatments with the incremental benefit of those treatments. Cost is always a consideration. Medicines that cost more than that monthly are (a) rare, (b) only prescribed to those, as you say, with a need for them - not as a preventative treatment for everyone.

Because it's sexually transmitted, you really can get a large drop in infections while only targeting one sex with the vaccination. There are exceptions - the vaccine take up among girls isn't 100%, and there will be some infection from older age groups and other countries (what 'small towns' has to do with this, I can't tell - did you mean men who have sex abroad?); and there's infection among homosexual men (the idea of offering the vaccine to any boy who mentions he's gay seems a good idea to me too).

[Exultant Democracy]

11. It's called herd immunity. If 90% of so of the girls are immunized everyone gets the benefit

not just the boys but even the 10% of girls that don't get the vaccination. Spending is always a matter of trade offs and spending twice as much for not statistical benefit would actually be immoral when the money could be better used elsewhere.

[MissB]

9. In the US they are now recommending it for boys.

I was asked if I wanted to start the series for my youngest when I took him in for his flu shot this fall. I opted not to that day, because I wanted to have both of my boys on the same schedule to minimize visits. They get their second shot in the series in January. My insurance company covers it fully.

I had taken both boys in for a physical two months prior and their ped didn't mention it. I started to see the new recommendation in the news right before the flu shot visit, so it didn't surprise me to be asked.

[JitterbugPerfume]

8. strange indeed that they don't include boys

[northzax]

12. Not really

The particular strains of hpv covered by guardasil are linked to cervical cancer, which boys, of course, aren't susceptible to. It would be like giving women a prophylactic for prostate cancer. All the side effects, for zero benefit. Boys who engage in homosexual sex should be immunized, since there is a small risk for oral and anal cancer, but there is no health risk for penile area infections of these strains.

[MayHamm]

14. No health risk?!

Really? Go look at some of the HPV images at medical sites of male genitals covered with warts. It does not have to cause cancer to horribly wreck a young man's life.

[Evasporque]

13. Now we can all have pretty junk...nt