I'd like to suggest one small edit to Reuters health and science reporter Julie Steenhuysen's otherwise commendable article on young people's misunderstanding of HPV vaccine protection, based on one of her own previous, equally commendable article on HPV vaccine recommendations for boys.
Some adolescent girls adolescents who get the HPV vaccine to prevent cervical cancer wrongly think they no longer need to practice safe sex, U.S. researchers said on Monday.
The study, published in the Archives of Pediatric & Adolescent Medicine, shows the need for better education about the vaccines and their limitations.
Merck's Gardasil and GlaxoSmithKline's Cervarix vaccines protect against strains of the humanpapilloma virus or HPV that cause cervical cancer. Gardasil also protects against some strains of the virus that cause genital warts.
But neither vaccine can prevent other forms of sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis, gonorrhea or human immunodeficiency virus or HIV that causes AIDS.
And HPV vaccines can only prevent HPV infections; they do not treat active infections.
Most girls young people who get the vaccine know its limitations, the researchers said, but the vaccines are recommended for all girls young people aged 11 to 12, and overestimating their effect could increase a young woman's person's risk of contracting other sexually transmitted diseases.
Source: Reuters
Given all the hype, and given how recently the vaccine has been recommended for boys it's understandable that people are still thinking mostly in terms of HPV vaccines and girls. But the fact remains that boys as well as girls are at risk of HPV-related cancers (it's linked to penile, throat, and rectal cancer, for instance.) And it further remains the fact that (statistically speaking) by definition boys are as likely to receive HPV and other STIs from girls as girls are likely to receive them from boys. That's sort of how heterosexual disease transmission works.
Finally, call me a rebel here but while I understand the researchers surveyed only adolescent girls and so it would have been inappropriate for them to extrapolate... it's a safe bet that a comparable survey of adolescent boys would find they're at least as likely to make the same mistake.
So if it was me, while composing educational outreach materials on the matter I'd drop the adolescent boys or adolescent girls language and just make sure I was trying to reach adolescents, period.
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<i>by definition boys are as
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Tue, 2012-01-10 04:00.<i>by definition boys are as likely to receive HPV and other STIs from girls as girls are likely to receive them from boys. That's sort of how heterosexual disease transmission works.</i>
Um. I was under the impression that in fact most penetrative sex acts carried more risk of transferring infection from the insertive to the receptive partner than vice versa. Was I mistaken?
While surface-to-surface
Submitted by figleaf on Tue, 2012-01-10 09:53.While surface-to-surface diseases like HPV and herpes are transmitted relatively easily from simple contact you're right that with many STIs the receptive partner during penetrative sex is at greater per-incident risk than the penetrator. So you're right there. But per-incident risk notwithstanding most STIs are transmitted between heterosexuals with the result that pretty much every man with an STI had a previous woman partner who had one, and she in turn had a previous male partner, and so on going back for thousands to millions of years (depending on your STI.) --fl
It seems really odd to me
Submitted by Irene (not verified) on Tue, 2012-01-10 09:52.It seems really odd to me that anyone would be paying enough attention to the shots that they would know that they were against an STI, and yet so little that they didn't know they weren't against all STIs. Given how few kids practice safe sex as it is, are the rates really any higher due to HPV shots, or are the researchers just hearing about unsafe sex practices and ignorance about HPV from the same people who would have had unsafe sex anyway?
In my experience most kids pay no attention to what shots they get -- it's just something doctors and parents make them do. (One of my daughters had a fair idea what it was all about, but she's the one who'd read Our Bodies, Ourselves pretty much cover to cover by age twelve or so.) Plus HPV is pretty esoteric, as STIs go -- to most people who don't think about it, there is only one STI, namely AIDS, and everyone knows there is no immunization for that yet. In any case, seems to me everything I've seen about HPV makes the point that getting a tetanus shot isn't carte blanche to leave your shoes off in the farmyard.
"But a small group of girls -- 23.6 percent -- believed they were less at risk for getting sexually transmitted diseases after getting the vaccine." Well, if it was actually phrased that way on the questionnaire (big if, I know), they WERE. Their total risk of getting STIs WAS less. Not a lot less, but that answer would strictly speaking be logically correct.
"Well, if it was actually
Submitted by figleaf on Tue, 2012-01-10 10:04."Well, if it was actually phrased that way on the questionnaire (big if, I know), they WERE. Their total risk of getting STIs WAS less. Not a lot less, but that answer would strictly speaking be logically correct." Ooh! Excellent point. If you're too logical or too smart you fail the question! (Incidentally this is why generating survey questions is not for amateurs!) Thanks, Irene. --fl