It would greatly reduce other types of cancer too. Men also benefit from it. Unfortunately the way campaigns market it causes many people to think it benefits ladies only.
A cursory understanding of the virus, insurance, and the age bounding of getting vaccinated would lead anyone to the same conclusion. Unless they are allergic to the word “vaccine”.
Basically, the vaccines dont work with prior exposure, and there is no test to know if men have been exposed. So thats why there is no focus on men, and why initially men were only approved for use if they were under 26 years old, based purely on probabilities they havent been exposed yet. This is a problem for insurance companies.
Also at one point in time, it wasnt linked to cancers affecting men, and men were seen only as carriers. Now it seems any area of flesh exposed to HPV strains are at risk of cancer there.
The age of male coverage has been expanded to like mid-40s by now.
The abstinence crowd worried about anything that makes people feel safer engaging in sex will get you killed.
The vaccine (Gardasil) protects against 9 strains. Even if you've been exposed to 1 strain, it protects against the other 8 strains.
>Also at one point in time, it wasnt linked to cancers affecting men, and men were seen only as carriers. Now it seems any area of flesh exposed to HPV strains are at risk of cancer there.
Even if it didn't do anything in men, it's stupid not to vaccinate as many people as possible to get herd immunity. We understand this for a hundred years now with other vaccines, why not this one?
Apart from that it's not a bad guess to think that if it causes one cancer it will be causing other types of cancer as well. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
>The age of male coverage has been expanded to like mid-40s by now.
Sadly in Germany it's still only for younger men. And older men weren't offered the vaccine at all when they were younger, so they never got the offer. I paid out of pocket for it, but it's still stupid that we're still putting a part of the population at unnecessary risk for cancer, and also decreasing herd immunity at the same time.
Lack of HPV vaccination is just a symptom of lack of understanding of science and statistics in politics.
At some point it stops being about science or understanding and starts being wholly about politics. There's a lot more "well these demographics or institutions f-ing hate me so I'm sure as shit not taking their word for anything" going around than there was a decade ago.
180€ per injection. The normal schedule is 3 injections. (first, 1 month, 6 month). However I checked and NHS (UK) did a study on it that showed a single injection provides the same protection as 3, so they changed their injection schedule to single injection for people under 25, and 2 injections (first + 6-24 months) for over 25s due to the expectation that older immune systems take longer to adapt.
The German (StIKo) recommendation is still 3, but I prefer listening to the NHS here because they have been more scientific about this in the past and seem to be actively studying this stuff.
I asked my doctor and they said I can pick the schedule I want, since it's not insured anyway. So I picked the two injection schedule. So that makes 360€ for me. If the NHS study holds you could probably pick a single injection and already have most or all of the protection. I picked two because I figured it's still recommended for my age group that way.
>And the doctors say there isn't much point because I've probably been exposed already (considering number of partners that's likely).
My doctor said the same, but the NHS says it's still useful from their studies. Especially since Gardasil protects against 9 variants. It's unlikely you've been exposed to all 9 variants.
I am not a doctor, so I can only tell you what I've found helpful in making my decision.
I forgot to link the sources the 9-valent vaccine is the current Gardasil:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/single-dose-of-hp...
The FDA recommends it for males under 45 now. It does prevent infection from new exposures. In time I bet that we will find it reduces cancer incidence even in those infected before vaccination. Those studies will take years to complete and it is too early to tell.
When the vaccine was first available, it was rationed, and the highest priority was for young girls before they become sexually active since they have the highest benefit.
My doctor recommended it to me and it was covered by insurance. They said while it cannot protect you from previous exposure it’s pretty wide so it’s unlikely I have yet to encounter every HPV variation it protects against.
> The CDC suggests catch-up HPV vaccinations for all people through age 26 who aren't fully vaccinated.
> The FDA approved the use of Gardasil 9 for males and females ages 9 to 45.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/hpv-infection...
> HPV vaccine is recommended for routine vaccination at age 11 or 12 years. (Vaccination can be started at age 9.)
> ACIP also recommends vaccination for everyone through age 26 years if not adequately vaccinated when younger. HPV vaccination is given as a series of either two or three doses, depending on age at initial vaccination.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/hpv/hcp/recommendations.htm...
You have to bring it up to the doctor yourself though.
I was going to be traveling overseas, and was worried it would be required by a foreign country. I wanted all vaccines handled by my American GP, so the records would be in one place. I was very insistent: "Give me every vaccine for every country."
He said if I wanted the vaccine that bad, I'd have to get it overseas.
The extent to which these vaccines would be helpful to mean is usually to avoid hurting women. Which is not minor at all, I would definitely get one for that reason alone. But I wouldn't be concerned for personal risks.
Suppose tomorrow we cure all stds, according to this model we would have infinite worldwide orgies until a new std mutates into existence or infects a human, only then would promiscuity slow down as the std spreads, until we return back into stable levels of debauchery.
edit: bonus https://xkcd.com/592/
I do know that it was and is highly tied to promiscuity as a risk factor. I also know that since it's not as lethal now, some people in those risk groups just risk it more often, with condomless prep even.
Also a pandemic is a spike in cases that needs to be considered over the long term. The risk of contracting diseases includes contracting a previously untestable slow onset disease and being an early patient of a pandemic, which usually happens to people with high partner count.
It's like computer viruses, we fill a package.json with 100 dependencies which in turn have a supply chain (partner's partners) and install it on a vm anyways. That would be unthinkable 30 years ago, but now we have better cryptography, open source auditing OS level and kernel security. Yet ransomware attacks are not less common than the early trojans.
The topic it overlaps with doesn’t matter
Figure out your own sexual value system, we’re preventing cancers
It does to voters. Reducing the workload for healthcare providers is great if you believe in science, but half of voters in the US think they can cure COVID with a horse dewormer because they read it on the internet somewhere.
Perhaps short term there would be a reduction in cases, but since promiscuity would increase, they could either return to normal levels until the risk level is as before, OR it could even surpass previous risk levels by overcorrection and then go back down, losing even temporal benefits.
I’m guessing your reply was about quantifying “strain on the healthcare system”, frequency of positive STD diagnosis and treatment is not as stressful as frequency of cancer diagnosis and treatment
HPV inoculation mitigates several cancers from manifesting and subsequently advancing, no matter how promiscuous people choose to be
on an individual basis, it is a low effort thing to take an HPV vaccine, no different than the regime for inoculating against chicken pox. its wild to think that if chickenpox was linked to cancers where genitalia happens to be and go, that developed nations around the world would have had issues rolling it out, like, get over it? People can consider changing their relationship with the government if they think state involvement is the same as its endorsement of contributing activities
"HPV inoculation mitigates several cancers from manifesting and subsequently advancing, no matter how promiscuous people choose to be"
Right, there's different strains of HPV, often called types, and since the article focuses on their effect on cervical cancers, we are focused on the ones that are transmitted sexually, as those are the ones that cause cervical cancer.
"on an individual basis, it is a low effort thing to take an HPV vaccine, no different than the regime for inoculating against chicken pox. its wild to think that if chickenpox was linked to cancers where genitalia happens to be and go, that developed nations around the world would have had issues rolling it out, like, get over it? People can consider changing their relationship with the government if they think state involvement is the same as its endorsement of contributing activities"
I'm not familiar with how HPV relates to the state. But I would like to make clear that the locus of the cancer and the transmission route of the pathogen are NOT coincidences. Pathogens enter the body either through abrasions, and less commonly through mucous membrane absorption. The damage is caused not necessarily by the resources the pathogen parasites, but by the collateral damage the pathogen causes to enter the body. At any rate the damage is localized to the site the infection occured.
So yes, to the extent that HPV causes cervical cancer, it's an std. To the extent that it's not an std it doesn't cause cervical cancer.
There's other types of cancer that cause oropharyngeal cancer and are related to oral sex by the way. Same mechanism, so PSA if you love your partner don't be rough with them, you can literally hurt them in irreversible lasting ways.
Do you have an evidence that it is?
Maybe it would mean that? I see the logic, we have more vaccines and cures now so to reach the same risk there would need to be more sex, according to the theory.
But it doesn't mean it is increasing now or that it generally increases over time.
As the risk of stds fluctuate, so would promiscuity, albeit with a time displacement and inversely of course.
So that's what the hypothesis would predict. A steep decrease in promiscuity following a pandemic, and then a gradual growth as a cure for it or vaccine is found.
Regarding the present time. I think we would be in a promiscuous phase, yes, the std risks are quite low.
Evidence? How about dropping marriage and increasing divorce rates? Divorces even peak in the aids pandemic. The effect of cures for gonorrhea ,clam etc.. I don't know exact dates, but generally it does coincide that we've been curing them for the past century and marriage is becoming less prevalent.
Maybe you can argue that married people are as promiscuous as single people, but at that point the onus is back on you.
Any onus is on you.
Maybe some data or a study. You offered opinion on marriages collapsing. That’s not evidence of promiscuity.
If we are just coming up with theories before looking at evidence you would imagine STDs benefitting from more risky sexual behaviour as it would be an advantage to them spreading.
Re less risky sex, that's interesting, no doubt a consequence of condoms. Fwiw I do think that the type of promiscuity that is conducing to stds right now is not the type of casual sex that occurs with condoms, but rather the serial monogamy that allows for sex without condoms. This occurs over longer periods of time.
At least for now, and probably for a looong time, skin to skin stds of the genital area are pretty minor. So a partner count of 50 with condom over 1 year is not as risky as a partner count of 10 over 10 years.
For the former group (promiscuous but use condoms) the most relevant stds are probably going to be oral, precisely because it is a less lethal route. But I do concede that increasing the frequency of exposures of less lethal routes (pelvic skin to skin) will never reach the risk levels of even limited riskier pathways (genital to genital) but it can get pretty close.
Condoms change everything, and that's why evidence for this is going to be so hard to gather, the sample size of global pandemics and tech advancements is one. there are no multiple scenarios to test, we have one set of birth control and prophylaxis and one set of stds and one set of cures to study the effects on populations. I would imagine populations with delayed access to technology, like africa, might be a good place to look into. They get the latest stds but not always the latest tech. Hiv is super high in some parts.
I never said we shouldn't be making the vaccines or curing diseases or making airplines safer, just suggested that the death rate could remain constant.
I do but I'm pretty kinky (and poly) :P but most people have pretty monogamous sex lives. It's societal standards that stop people from doing this, or they simply have no interest.
It's not like most married or dating couples are like "Hey will we do a movie or an orgy tonight? Let's do the movie because I'm worried about STDs". Could you really imagine that? Most people abhor the idea of having sex with lots of random people :)
In a society that didn't have all this ingrained religious programming that sex is somehow bad it might be true but this is not our reality.
Cheating promsicuity is probably the case for most primates, and certainly the case for many mammals as shown by their preference to mate during the dark.
It relates to paternity certainty and mate jealousy/protection, which is again, present in most species.
I see you're calling a vaccine a "vaccine". Noted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_that_can_get_S...
If I were 10-ish years younger, I wouldn't have gotten cancer. I was likely exposed to HPV in my early to mid 20s, where it hid in my tonsils for decades.
In the US, almost anyone under 45 can get vaccinated. Please do. As another comment points out, they protect against multiple strains. It's unlikely you've been exposed to all of them.
While HPV+ head and neck cancers are more easily and more successfully treated than HPV- ones, I do not recommend getting cancer.
From the outside, I look like a normal person of late middle age. The two incision scars I have look like neck folds -- literally no one, including medical personnel outside of the cancer world, notices them.
From the inside, tho:
* Can no longer taste sugar, salt, chocolate, and a host of other, smaller things. Most other things have less taste and pretty much nothing has a flavor after a few bites. For some, this eventually stops -- I'm unlucky. (Radiation destruction of taste buds)
* Significantly decreased saliva to the throat. Cannot eat without some liquid. The saliva that forms is thicker and sometimes causes problems swallowing. Some get this to the mouth and to a larger extreme -- I'm lucky. (Radiation)
* Dental trauma, including teeth extraction / root canal / deep fillings, may cause spontaneous bone tissue death in the jaw. (Radiation)
* Permanent sensation of partial numbness centered around my left ear and cheek. Touching that area produces a pins and needles sensation. (Neck dissection)
* No feeling in a stripe about 1.5" (4cm) wide where the neck dissection scars are. (Neck dissection)
* Changes in speech quality. These are not clinically significant but changed my voice from one people enjoyed listening to (asked to do voice over work, complemented, etc) to just another voice. (Surgery)
* Tinnitus increased significantly and hearing has worsened. I was not given chemo, the normal cause of hearing loss. (Unsure cause)
There's more, but those are some of the highlights. Get vaccinated, get your kids vaccinated, etc.
HPV- head and neck cancers in the US are dropping as people quit smoking. HPV+ are on the rise for now, but will drop as the generations with vaccinations get older.
I'm traveling today, but will look at this later today if anyone has a question to ask.
Congratulations on surviving!
The remaining gaps in screening and vaccine uptake reflect broader lack of health-care capabilities that won't be solved with pushing the HPV vaccine alone. Changing from injectable to oral could help, but isn't on the table, and local populations and governments are likely to become increasingly resistant to outsiders waving their science authorities, particularly on family matters.
Both authors are Phd's working in outreach - i.e., they seem to have no experience with deploying HPV campaigns.