- HPVs are extremely common: 80% of men and 90% of women will have at least one strain in their lives. Unless you plan to remain completely celibate, you are likely to contract a strain.
- Sooner is better, but vaccination can be done at any age. Guidelines often lag behind, but vaccination makes sense even if you are currently HPV-positive. While it won't clear an existing infection, it protects against different strains and reinfection (typically body removed HPV in 1-2 years). See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38137661/
- HPV16 is responsible for a large number of throat cancers (around 50% in smokers and 80% in non-smokers!). This affects both men and women. Vaccinating men is important for their own safety and to reduce transmission to their partners.
"HPV is most commonly spread during vaginal or anal sex. It also spreads through close skin-to-skin touching during sex"
This focuses on sex, but any virus that can be found on skin, also has a chance to be transmitted without sex just as well. Admittedly the chance here for HPV infection is much higher with regard to sex, but not non-zero otherwise. The HeLa cells also contain a HPV virus in the genome, though this was probably transmitted via sex:
"The cells are characterized to contain human papillomavirus 18 (HPV-18)"
HPV-18. I think HPV-18 may in general be more prevalent than HPV-16.
>> HPVs are extremely common: 80% of men and 90% of women will have at least one strain in their lives.
This statistic seems to be used by some people to avoid the vaccine - they figure they've already had it at some point. The biggest problem with that logic is that not all strains are as dangerous and they probably have not contracted 16 or 18 specifically. The other problem is there's still a good number of people who have never had it and shouldn't assume they have because its common.
> This statistic seems to be used by some people to avoid the vaccine
The FDA itself restricted access to the vaccine on the basis of age. Given that virions aren't even involved in the production process, its safety should have been deemed good enough for the entire population early on.
But this misunderstands how HPV works. First, there are many strains. Typical tests for oncogenic variants measure around 30 types. The vaccine I received (Gardasil-9, which I took as a male at age 35) protects against nine specific strains.
Second, the body normally clears HPV naturally after 1-2 years. However, natural infection often does not provide immunity, so reinfection can easily occur (even from the same partner or a different part of your own body).
People often assume that HPV is either a lifetime infection or that recovery guarantees immunity - neither is the case!
Parent is overstating the case. Neither infection nor vaccination provides sterilizing immunity [1], but the general reasons to prefer vaccination are (in order of descending quality of evidence & reasoning):
1) you probably haven't had all N strains yet.
2a) you likely haven't been infected with the ones that cause cancer, because they're relatively rare.
2b) ...that is especially true if you're young and not sexually active.
2) being infected with one strain does not provide sterilizing cross-immunity against the other strains.
3) even if you've been infected with a strain, some of the vaccines have been shown to prevent reinfection and reactivation better than natural infection alone.
4) in general, the vaccination-mediated immunity might last longer or be "stronger" than the natural version, since the vaccines are pretty immunogenic, and the viruses are not.
But for point 4, it's well-known that vaccine efficacy is lower for people who have already seroconverted (cf [1]), so there's clearly some amount of practical immunity provided by infection.
[1] The vaccines are roughly 90% effective for the major cancer-causing strains, but it's not a simple answer, and varies a lot by how you frame the question. See table 2 here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8706722/
Also be sure to see table 4 if you're a man. The data for biological men and women are surprisingly different!
A question for your doctor and your partner (and of course, you can read the data in the link I posted above and use that to influence your conversation and decision!)
I'm not being avoidant here -- medical decisions are always subjective and multi-factor, and I can't begin to tell you what you should do. (But I also sincerely believe that propagandists try to reduce nuanced data to talking points, which is equally wrong.)
Please note the caveat about gender that I just added. The data for biological men and women are very different. Also, I haven't discussed risks at all, which is the other side of the ledger -- these vaccines are pretty darned safe, but everything comes with risk, and only you can decide what level of risk is appropriate for your life.
You get to make your own health choices here, but as someone who got the vaccine in my 30s, I am glad as I didn’t know about my future divorce when I got vaccinated.
It's never a guarantee in practice, the CDC says "More than 98% of recipients develop an antibody response to HPV types included in the respective vaccines 1 month after completing a full vaccination series"
>>>>> HPVs are extremely common: 80% of men and 90% of women will have at least one strain in their lives.
>> This statistic seems to be used by some people to avoid the vaccine - they figure they've already had it at some point. The biggest problem with that logic is that not all strains are as dangerous and they probably have not contracted 16 or 18 specifically. The other problem is there's still a good number of people who have never had it and shouldn't assume they have because its common.
As people cite these statistics, it would be useful to distinguish exposure to HPV causing foot warts, etc from the much more dangerous variants. I rarely see any statistics do this sort of segmentation.
> I rarely see any statistics do this sort of segmentation.
There are multiple publications. THe easiest way to find is Gemini 3 Pro or ChatGPT Thinking + find for publications (go to link, not just rely on summary).
They differ by population and methodology. For example, here is "Age-specific and genotype-specific carcinogenic human papillomavirus prevalence in a country with a high cervical cancer burden: results of a cross-sectional study in Estonia", 2023,
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10255022/
Yeah, I only read the abstract and looked at the plots, but this is what I hate about public health papers:
They say the prevalence of virus is down. They don't say that the cancer rate is down (granted too early to tell), nor do they talk about any adverse events or all cause mortality differences (again, probably too early to tell)
The only thing they can conclude is that the treatment given to stop the virus, stops the virus. But they don't mention any tradeoffs.
Not trying to be an anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist, but good science needs to talk about the whole picture.
Research papers are not literature reviews. This paper reports on the results of this study. And that study only investigated what it investigated.
In the case of public health, there are a bunch of organizations that keep on top of the research and maintain a more comprehensive view of their perception of the current consensus.
For day to day guidance, individuals should be referring to either those sources, or healthcare professionals.
If people are looking at individual studies like this to make decisions, something has gone very wrong.
I, a male, got vaccinated with the Gardasil 9 vaccine shortly before turning 40. Convincing my doctor to prescribe it wasn't terribly difficult, I told them a few things about my sexual history and explained some of my sexual plans, and that was that.
How much did it cost? I've considered it but it seems the only option for me is to pay for it out of pocket (~$1000 for the full course), which seems kind of not worth it at this point.
Best of luck, the reason it took so long for males to be approved for Gardasil use and they slowly keep pushing it up by age is two fold:
1) if you've ever been exposed to HPV already, then the vaccine is useless
2) there is no test to determine if a male has been exposed, although there is one for females
so they just push the ages up by probability, over time. As the probability of a man being with an older and therefore unvaccinated woman decreases - since with women is the most probable - the age can rise
> 1) if you've ever been exposed to HPV already, then the vaccine is useless
This is patently incorrect. The vaccine protects against 9 variants. Having been exposed to all 9 before vaccination sounds like really bad luck.
> 2) there is no test to determine if a male has been exposed, although there is one for females
The female HPV tests, as I understand, only test for the presence of HPV in the cervix. It can be present in many other areas. No one is testing women for the presence of HPV on their hands or in their throats.
Most places now offer HPV vaccines to young boys as well. People over 40 more or less missed the boat, but they can still get vaccinated. How useful it is depends entirely on their personal circumstances and risk profiles.
> 2) there is no test to determine if a male has been exposed, although there is one for females
It is incorrect. I had it tested multiple times. It is done less routinely, usually under assumption that since it is women who are mostly at risk, why bother testing men. Which is horrible mindset in anything related to epidemiology.
> It is done less routinely, usually under assumption that since it is women who are mostly at risk, why bother testing men. Which is horrible mindset in anything related to epidemiology.
No. The general reason that people don't do the test for men is that DNA testing is extremely sensitive, and produces a lot of false positives for a virus that is widespread.
It's also not actionable. You can't treat an asymptomatic infection, and a positive leads to the same outcome they would give anyway: use physical barriers and abstinence.
(Edit: hilariously, your first link says exactly what I just wrote, at the very top of the page. Did you read it?)
The claim I refuted is that there are no test for men (there are). Not sure why you want to get needlessly argumentative here, repeating things I already linked (sic!).
Sure, test from penis has lower specificity and sensitivity that for cervix, but it is not binary "works or not" (as side note, just measuring from urethra is rarely enough [1]). Life is probability, and it is a huge fallacy to believe that things work 100% or 0%, nothing in between (rarely the case in medicine).
Results are actionable on many ways. Most important, screening for female partners, informed risk for partners or your on safety for ones partners (condoms BTW reduce infection rates, but do not fully protect, as HPV can be on other parts of skin).
[1]
> The overall prevalence of HPV was 65.4%. HPV detection was highest at the penile shaft (49.9% for the full cohort and 47.9% for the subcohort of men with complete sampling), followed by the glans penis/coronal sulcus (35.8% and 32.8%) and scrotum (34.2% and 32.8%). Detection was lowest in urethra (10.1% and 10.2%) and semen (5.3% and 4.8%) samples. Exclusion of urethra, semen, and either perianal, scrotal, or anal samples resulted in a <5% reduction in prevalence.
so far the comments are adding more vectors to understanding the situation, but nothing that fundamentally changes the user experience
I think the most insightful thing is that there are 9 HPV variants some of which someone wouldn't have exposure to so its worthwhile to get the vaccine anyway
but other than that, the situation is the same. for men's age the utility of the vaccine is based on probability alone, as its a waste of resources to even attempt checking for prior/current exposure
this is what I don't understand, why is it useless? there're multiple variants, vaccination could create reaction to a different part of the virus, etc.
> Unless you plan to remain completely celibate, you are likely to contract a strain.
There's a whole range of behaviors and HPV risk profiles between celibate and being a slut. Having one long term trusted sexual partner and not acting like a whore would reduce HPV risk more than a vaccine. Worked for thousands of years.
Is there any issue for adult males vaccinating ? I seem to remember some mention of risk by my doctor when I asked about it, but I might be misremembering.
No vaccine is without risk, but the vaccine approach is based on that risk being so low (but not zero) in comparison to the risk of not vaccinating that it is vastly the better choice.
Ok that was a bad question, let me rephrase: isn't there something particularly bad about this one for males that are already adults that makes it not recommended by doctors by default?
> While it won't clear an existing infection, it protects against different strains and reinfection (typically body removed HPV in 1-2 years). See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38137661/
The study you've quoted here is not definitive evidence of the claim you're making, and that claim is...let's just say that it's controversial. Conventional wisdom is that you're unlikely to benefit from HPV vaccination unless you have not already seroconverted for at least one of the 9 strains (6, 11, 16, 18, 31, 33, 45, 52, 58) in the current vaccine.
There's not much hard evidence to suggest that vaccination for HPV has strong ability to protect you from a strain after you've already been infected with that strain [1], as the best available data shows a substantial decline in efficacy for women over age 26 and for women of any age who had prior documented infection [2]. This study is small, unrandomized, and the measured primary outcome (anti-HPV IgG) doesn't really tell you anything about relative effectiveness at clearing an infection. The only real evidence they advance for this claim is:
> Persistent HPV infection after vaccination was significantly less frequent in the nine-valent vaccinated group (23.5%) compared to the control group (88.9%; p < 0.001).
...but again, this is a small, unrandomized trial. We don't know how these 60 people differ from the typical HPV-positive case. You can't rely on this kind of observational data to claim causality.
Vaccination is great, but let's not exaggerate or spread inaccurate claims in a fit of pro-vaccine exuberance. The HPV vaccine has age range recommendations [3] for a reason.
[1] For the somewhat obvious reason that your immune system has already seen the virus.
It's also worth calling out table 4, which shows the (IMO bad) efficacy data for biological men, which is why I only talk about women, above, and why anyone who recommends vaccination without mentioning this factor is not being entirely forthright. Few people are rushing to give older men the HPV vaccine because it's not really supported by data!
[3] I believe the current guideline is under age 45 in the USA.
> - Sooner is better, but vaccination can be done at any age. Guidelines often lag behind, but vaccination makes sense even if you are currently HPV-positive.
However, the vaccination is expensive (~1k) and it is difficult to find doctors who will do non-recommended vaccinations for self-payers.
This is ultimately an American site so you can assume 80%+ of comments come from a US background (I'm not American, I've just been here longer than I should have).
Are there insurance plans that won't cover it? I know that a lot of plans love not paying for things but vaccines seem to be the one thing that they all at least seem fairly good at (at least in my experience).
I am currently getting the HPV series and I only had to pay my copay for the first appointment have nothing for the second one (I am assuming it will be the same for the third)
as an ordinary person, I see almost zero throat cancer cases in decades of living. Meanwhile pharma companies are working with Kaiser Health to constantly push new vaccines of all kinds, as if they are required. Bill Gates has fantasies of requiring vaccinations of hundreds of millions of people, and was formally barred from enacting in the US. I see a profit and power motive with weak, scared people acting as foot soldiers, and mercenary companies as professional actors. Bad, bad combinations IMHO.
My reading of the following is that the cost of each additional quality adjusted life year would be over $100,000, rather than that each vaccination prompts $100k in economic value
> Including preadolescent boys in a routine vaccination programme for preadolescent girls resulted in higher costs and benefits and generally had cost effectiveness ratios that exceeded $100 000 per QALY across a range of HPV related outcomes, scenarios for cervical cancer screening, and assumptions of vaccine efficacy and duration
Just a quick point as an American living in Denmark, one of the reasons government programs like this work so well is everything is delivered digitally. We have "e-boks" https://en.digst.dk/systems/digital-post/about-the-national-... official government facilitated inboxes so when they need to notify you of vaccinations or whatever else, it arrives to your inbox. And basically 100% of residents use these systems.
I fail to see how e-boks makes this work. Younger people check their e-boks less frequently than average, so sending a physical letter to their address would work just as well if not better.
e-boks sends a text message to the phone, so I see it much faster than a paper mail.
e-boks is like gmail (and others) in that it keeps your old mail. So you can easily find old stuff, a great improvement on paper mail.
I don't even check my physical mailbox once a week.
Denmark is one of the very most digital countries. Physical mail is very much on the way out. We no longer has mailboxes to send mail, you have to go to a shop to send letters, which now cost at last $6 per letter due to the low amount of mail sent.
It is only a matter of less than 10 years before letters will be fully gone.
Okay, well Ireland has similar vaccination rates, broader childhood vaccination coverage, and no central medical records at all, so while e-boks may assist administration, it's certainly not necessary.
Which is bad, we definitely should have them. Referral data appears to be managed through Healthlink, which may just be a privatised not always used medical record system.
I'm a proponent of EHRs but not necessarily of centralised medical records, which have not been shown to improve outcomes and which do impose serious privacy risks on patients.
HealthLink is a messaging system and stores no EHRs at all. eHealth is the National EHR programme aiming to roll out EHRs by 2030 nationwide.
It will be a no-opt-out centralised EHR and combined social care record.
In the 1960s, more than 900 people were diagnosed with cervical cancer each year, corresponding to more than 40 cases per 100,000 Danes.
Today, that number is below 10 per 100,000 nationwide – and among women aged 20 to 29, only 3 out of 100,000 are affected. This is below the WHO’s threshold for elimination of the disease.
Lots of viruses are really oncogenic. The real success here is the ability of Denmark to track effectiveness. It sounds crazy but most countries do not have electronic health record capability to measure the effect of many interventions at population scale. Once good EHRs are rolled out, we will be able to double down on effective interventions, like this one, and vice versa.
Sadly, no matter how good the data is, some societies will value opinions of uninformed celebrities above facts and reason, leading to a resurgence of preventable diseases.
The numbers are quite solid. People who don't want to accept the numbers, need to come up with an explanation why the data can not be trusted. With regard to oncogenic HPV, I think the data is very convincing. To me it was a lot more convincing than the SARS covid datapoints (e. g. the media constantly shifted; I noticed this with regard to Sweden, which had a bad early data due to barely any protection of the elderly, but lateron it still had better data than e. g. Austria which went into lockdown - so Austria had worse data points than Sweden overall. Japan or Taiwan had excellent data points, so the respective governments were much better than either Sweden or Austria. The most incompetent politicans acted in Austria during that time, replacing facts with promo and propaganda. The data points, though, were always solid. I remember I compared this about weekly and it was interesting to me when Austria suddenly surpassed Sweden negatively; the media here in Austria critisized Sweden early on, but once Sweden outperformed Austria in a better, more positive manner, suddenly the media no longer reported that. Private media simply can not be trusted.)
Celebrities in general are quite dubous. See a certain actor suddenly promoting Palantir spysniffing on mankind. I decided that guy won't get a dime from me for the rest of my life - when actors suddenly become lobbyists for Evil, they need to not get any money from regular people really.
Idk the Danish approach of opennnes seems to be working for them. They acknowledge it isn't fully effective. They acknowledge that there may be a small risk of side effects. And they tell people it's worth it and to go take it.
"Since HPV vaccination was implemented in the Danish childhood vaccination programme in 2009, we have received 2,320 reports of suspected adverse reactions from HPV vaccines up to and including 2016. 1,023 of the reported adverse reactions have been categorised as serious. In the same period, 1,724,916 vaccine doses were sold. The reports related to HPV vaccination that we have classified as serious include reports of the condition Postural Orthostatic Tachycardi Syndrome (POTS), fainting, neurological symptoms and a number of diffuse symptoms, such as long-term headache, fatigue and stomach ache."
"The risk of cervical changes at an early stage was reduced by 73% among women born in 1993 and 1994, who had been vaccinated with the HPV vaccine compared with those who had not been vaccinated."
"The Danish Health Authority recommends that all girls are vaccinated against HPV at the age of 12. The Danish Health Authori-
ty still estimates that the benefits of vaccination by far outweigh any possible adverse reactions from the vaccine."
Its not like it wasn't without issues. You had the documentary from a state funded tv station that uncritically let people claim all kind of issues after getting the vaccine. It drastically lowered the uptake of the vaccine.
> They acknowledge it isn't fully effective. They acknowledge that there may be a small risk of side effects. And they tell people it's worth it and to go take it.
Those are basic bits of knowledge that apply to most vaccinations.
The problem is that the quacks diminish the positive effects, exaggerate the negatives and engage in a campaign of fear mongering that costs some people (and in some cases lots of people, see COVID) their lives. They are not only clueless, they are malicious.
From Gwyneth Paltrow, JFK Jr, all the way to Donald Trump and a whole raft of others the damage is immense. I have a close family member who now is fully convinced of the healing power of crystals and there isn't a thing you can do to reason with people that have fallen into a trap like that.
I think those who advocate for censorship are gullible and have fallen for the bush-league trap of believing that the state is on your side and exists to benefit you.
No, I think this guy is right if you mention that one of the rare side effects of the HPV vaccine is chronic headaches then you are reducing vaccine uptake even if only over a short amount of time until new studies come out this is definitely worse for the population at hole and everyone involved should be thrown in jail for however long this guy thinks they should be thrown in jail for
Telling lies should never be criminalized, because there is no single trustworthy arbiter of truth.
This has nothing to do with vaccines. There is a very good reason that misinformation is, and should remain legal. This simply allows the person or group who gets to define what is or is not misinformation to arbitrarily imprison anyone doing publishing they don’t like.
You really need to think through the implications and consequences of censorship laws before advocating for them.
The data is IMO quite convincing. Harald zur Hausen pointed this out decades ago already; this is another data point that adds to the theory which back then he proposed was fairly new (not that viruses cause cancer, that is much older knowledge, but specifically the role of some HPV strains; Harald died about 2 years ago).
A comment with an article citing published medical literature on risks associated with this type of vaccine was flagged and hidden. Why? I don't know the author nor am I a medical doctor to understand the topic at depth, so it's a genuine question. Was it misleading? If so, how? That's what the comment was asking, actually, if there were counter-points to the text, which was favorable to live vaccines (e.g. shingles) but critical of those developed with other methods. Is there no merit to that? I genuinely don't know, and since it seems impossible to discuss the topic, it's hard to say.
I sometimes vouch for incorrectly flagged posts. You got me curious, so I took a look. What I found was a blog from an anonymous conspiracist vaccine opponent claiming to be a doctor. He's a decent writer but in my estimation a loon.
So I'm fine with it being flagged and decline to vouch for it.
> Infection with HPV types covered by the vaccine (HPV16/18) has been almost eliminated. Before vaccination, the prevalence of HPV16/18 was between 15–17%, which has decreased in vaccinated women to < 1% by 2021. However, about one-third of women still had HPV infection with non-vaccine high-risk HPV types, and new infections with these types were more frequent in vaccinated than in unvaccinated women.
I wonder if we'll those non-vaccine strains will eventually become the most prevalent.
In my EU country Gardasil 9 is the most common HPV vaccine nowadays. This protects against 9 most common strains. I would assume the same is true in other countries. We have gone from HPV 16/18 -> +6/11 -> +31/33/45/52/58 protection with 2/4/9-valent vaccines.
HPV vaccination leads to massive reduction in nasopharyngeal, penile and rectal cancer in men.
The focus of messaging around HPV vaccination on ovarian cancer, female fertility and the age limitations for recommendations / free vaccination in some places are nothing short of a massive public health failure and almost scandal.
Just truthfully tell the boys their dicks might fall off and see how all of them quicklky flock to the vaccine.
> Just truthfully tell the boys their dicks might fall off and see how all of them quicklky flock to the vaccine.
Every male above the age of 26 is locked out of the vaccine unless you pay out of pocket, which will be €300-€500 (or even higher).
It's led to this really weird situation, where HPV vaccination for men is now recommended up to 40s but only covered up to 26yr old, and that recommendation upgrade happened relatively recently. Which means there's a whole generation of men who are told they should get the vaccine, who would have had covered access to the vaccine in the past, but are now expected to go out of pocket.
Yep, I paid for mine. male/43/Spain. Almost €400. Two shots of the nonavalent vaccine, ~€190 each.
For younger people it's three shots (second after two months, third after 6 months of the first one), now for older (over 30s or 40s, I can't remember exactly) it's recommended to get two shots (second after six months).
You could probably have gotten away with it a decade ago but that is a very poor plan in the far more critical of public health world of today.
Statistically nobody even knows a guy who knows a guy who's dick fell off. Serious HPV problems for men are not even common enough to be viable urban legend. You have less to back up your DARE messaging than DARE did. It's just not gonna work. The nanosecond someone who took your bait shows up to be interviewed by some Youtube talking head about side effects the already severely damaged (compared to, IDK a decade ago) credibility of the medical establishment will go up in flames.
You need to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth and let people make their own decisions. People don't "trust the experts" anymore at the scale you need for stuff like vaccination campaigns so you have to operate based on that reality.
Apparently HPV is responsible for some ~70% of throat cancers and ~30% of penile cancers in men. Seems pretty significant to me.
If nobody knows a guy who knows a guy who had penile cancer, that's probably because people are very bad about talking about genital health. I'm sure some of the men in my life have issues with erectile dysfunction, enlarged prostates, hemmorrhoids, etc. But no one is talking about those issues.
Think of it as shared responsibility. The tobacco and the virus are both reasons why you got cancer and died, prizes for all.
So maybe 70% of throat cancer victims have HPV, and like 70% smoked - and if those were independent facts you'd expect that about 49% both smoked and had HPV, but it's actually more than half 'cos it turns out that if you have HPV then smoking is even worse. So that's nice.
And how many men get throat and penile cancers vs other cancers and health issues? There's a reason old men crack jokes about prostate health, erectile dysfunction and incontinence rather than their dicks falling off and are way more worried about colon cancer than rectal cancer.
I didn't say it wasn't a significant source of cancer. I said that nobody knows a guy who knows a guy who's dick fell off or some other extreme outcome. Without enough of that to back up your messaging it just won't work. You need to be honest with people, not try and scare them like you're trying to keep school kids from smoking weed in 1990.
The public messaging you're trying to engage in could perhaps have skated by in a less critical time but in the current environment it will be counterproductive.
I don't want my kid or my grandkid to get measles or some other "of immediate consequence" disease because they go to school with a bunch of unvaccinated kids because you people sullied the reputation of public health via "just push the truth a little, it'll make them take the vaccine" type endeavors.
I would like to add:
- HPVs are extremely common: 80% of men and 90% of women will have at least one strain in their lives. Unless you plan to remain completely celibate, you are likely to contract a strain.
- Sooner is better, but vaccination can be done at any age. Guidelines often lag behind, but vaccination makes sense even if you are currently HPV-positive. While it won't clear an existing infection, it protects against different strains and reinfection (typically body removed HPV in 1-2 years). See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38137661/
- HPV16 is responsible for a large number of throat cancers (around 50% in smokers and 80% in non-smokers!). This affects both men and women. Vaccinating men is important for their own safety and to reduce transmission to their partners.
> Unless you plan to remain completely celibate
You can get HPV without sex too.
https://www.cdc.gov/sti/about/about-genital-hpv-infection.ht...
"HPV is most commonly spread during vaginal or anal sex. It also spreads through close skin-to-skin touching during sex"
This focuses on sex, but any virus that can be found on skin, also has a chance to be transmitted without sex just as well. Admittedly the chance here for HPV infection is much higher with regard to sex, but not non-zero otherwise. The HeLa cells also contain a HPV virus in the genome, though this was probably transmitted via sex:
"The cells are characterized to contain human papillomavirus 18 (HPV-18)"
HPV-18. I think HPV-18 may in general be more prevalent than HPV-16.
>> HPVs are extremely common: 80% of men and 90% of women will have at least one strain in their lives.
This statistic seems to be used by some people to avoid the vaccine - they figure they've already had it at some point. The biggest problem with that logic is that not all strains are as dangerous and they probably have not contracted 16 or 18 specifically. The other problem is there's still a good number of people who have never had it and shouldn't assume they have because its common.
> This statistic seems to be used by some people to avoid the vaccine
The FDA itself restricted access to the vaccine on the basis of age. Given that virions aren't even involved in the production process, its safety should have been deemed good enough for the entire population early on.
But this misunderstands how HPV works. First, there are many strains. Typical tests for oncogenic variants measure around 30 types. The vaccine I received (Gardasil-9, which I took as a male at age 35) protects against nine specific strains.
Second, the body normally clears HPV naturally after 1-2 years. However, natural infection often does not provide immunity, so reinfection can easily occur (even from the same partner or a different part of your own body).
People often assume that HPV is either a lifetime infection or that recovery guarantees immunity - neither is the case!
Does the vaccine guarantee immunity, by contrast?
Parent is overstating the case. Neither infection nor vaccination provides sterilizing immunity [1], but the general reasons to prefer vaccination are (in order of descending quality of evidence & reasoning):
1) you probably haven't had all N strains yet.
2a) you likely haven't been infected with the ones that cause cancer, because they're relatively rare.
2b) ...that is especially true if you're young and not sexually active.
2) being infected with one strain does not provide sterilizing cross-immunity against the other strains.
3) even if you've been infected with a strain, some of the vaccines have been shown to prevent reinfection and reactivation better than natural infection alone.
4) in general, the vaccination-mediated immunity might last longer or be "stronger" than the natural version, since the vaccines are pretty immunogenic, and the viruses are not.
But for point 4, it's well-known that vaccine efficacy is lower for people who have already seroconverted (cf [1]), so there's clearly some amount of practical immunity provided by infection.
[1] The vaccines are roughly 90% effective for the major cancer-causing strains, but it's not a simple answer, and varies a lot by how you frame the question. See table 2 here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8706722/
Also be sure to see table 4 if you're a man. The data for biological men and women are surprisingly different!
What if you're married? Does it still make sense, if you know you won't ever be sleeping with a new partner?
A question for your doctor and your partner (and of course, you can read the data in the link I posted above and use that to influence your conversation and decision!)
I'm not being avoidant here -- medical decisions are always subjective and multi-factor, and I can't begin to tell you what you should do. (But I also sincerely believe that propagandists try to reduce nuanced data to talking points, which is equally wrong.)
Please note the caveat about gender that I just added. The data for biological men and women are very different. Also, I haven't discussed risks at all, which is the other side of the ledger -- these vaccines are pretty darned safe, but everything comes with risk, and only you can decide what level of risk is appropriate for your life.
[delayed]
You get to make your own health choices here, but as someone who got the vaccine in my 30s, I am glad as I didn’t know about my future divorce when I got vaccinated.
It's never a guarantee in practice, the CDC says "More than 98% of recipients develop an antibody response to HPV types included in the respective vaccines 1 month after completing a full vaccination series"
>>>>> HPVs are extremely common: 80% of men and 90% of women will have at least one strain in their lives. >> This statistic seems to be used by some people to avoid the vaccine - they figure they've already had it at some point. The biggest problem with that logic is that not all strains are as dangerous and they probably have not contracted 16 or 18 specifically. The other problem is there's still a good number of people who have never had it and shouldn't assume they have because its common.
As people cite these statistics, it would be useful to distinguish exposure to HPV causing foot warts, etc from the much more dangerous variants. I rarely see any statistics do this sort of segmentation.
> I rarely see any statistics do this sort of segmentation.
There are multiple publications. THe easiest way to find is Gemini 3 Pro or ChatGPT Thinking + find for publications (go to link, not just rely on summary).
They differ by population and methodology. For example, here is "Age-specific and genotype-specific carcinogenic human papillomavirus prevalence in a country with a high cervical cancer burden: results of a cross-sectional study in Estonia", 2023, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10255022/
What about the people who know they have 16 or 18? Should they still get it?
Yeah, I only read the abstract and looked at the plots, but this is what I hate about public health papers:
They say the prevalence of virus is down. They don't say that the cancer rate is down (granted too early to tell), nor do they talk about any adverse events or all cause mortality differences (again, probably too early to tell)
The only thing they can conclude is that the treatment given to stop the virus, stops the virus. But they don't mention any tradeoffs.
Not trying to be an anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist, but good science needs to talk about the whole picture.
Research papers are not literature reviews. This paper reports on the results of this study. And that study only investigated what it investigated.
In the case of public health, there are a bunch of organizations that keep on top of the research and maintain a more comprehensive view of their perception of the current consensus.
For day to day guidance, individuals should be referring to either those sources, or healthcare professionals.
If people are looking at individual studies like this to make decisions, something has gone very wrong.
I, a male, got vaccinated with the Gardasil 9 vaccine shortly before turning 40. Convincing my doctor to prescribe it wasn't terribly difficult, I told them a few things about my sexual history and explained some of my sexual plans, and that was that.
I wish more people would get vaccinated.
I feel very uncomfortable trying to talk my doctor into doing something they don't recommend. I know too many people who buy into fake medical stuff.
Why is this different? Why is pestering a doctor to give me a medicine they don't recommend a good idea?
How much did it cost? I've considered it but it seems the only option for me is to pay for it out of pocket (~$1000 for the full course), which seems kind of not worth it at this point.
Best of luck, the reason it took so long for males to be approved for Gardasil use and they slowly keep pushing it up by age is two fold:
1) if you've ever been exposed to HPV already, then the vaccine is useless
2) there is no test to determine if a male has been exposed, although there is one for females
so they just push the ages up by probability, over time. As the probability of a man being with an older and therefore unvaccinated woman decreases - since with women is the most probable - the age can rise
> 1) if you've ever been exposed to HPV already, then the vaccine is useless
This is patently incorrect. The vaccine protects against 9 variants. Having been exposed to all 9 before vaccination sounds like really bad luck.
> 2) there is no test to determine if a male has been exposed, although there is one for females
The female HPV tests, as I understand, only test for the presence of HPV in the cervix. It can be present in many other areas. No one is testing women for the presence of HPV on their hands or in their throats.
Most places now offer HPV vaccines to young boys as well. People over 40 more or less missed the boat, but they can still get vaccinated. How useful it is depends entirely on their personal circumstances and risk profiles.
> 2) there is no test to determine if a male has been exposed, although there is one for females
It is incorrect. I had it tested multiple times. It is done less routinely, usually under assumption that since it is women who are mostly at risk, why bother testing men. Which is horrible mindset in anything related to epidemiology.
See:
- https://www.droracle.ai/articles/607248/what-methods-are-use...
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12256477/
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2024.2...
> 1) if you've ever been exposed to HPV already, then the vaccine is useless
Also no. See other comments.
> It is done less routinely, usually under assumption that since it is women who are mostly at risk, why bother testing men. Which is horrible mindset in anything related to epidemiology.
No. The general reason that people don't do the test for men is that DNA testing is extremely sensitive, and produces a lot of false positives for a virus that is widespread.
It's also not actionable. You can't treat an asymptomatic infection, and a positive leads to the same outcome they would give anyway: use physical barriers and abstinence.
(Edit: hilariously, your first link says exactly what I just wrote, at the very top of the page. Did you read it?)
The claim I refuted is that there are no test for men (there are). Not sure why you want to get needlessly argumentative here, repeating things I already linked (sic!).
Sure, test from penis has lower specificity and sensitivity that for cervix, but it is not binary "works or not" (as side note, just measuring from urethra is rarely enough [1]). Life is probability, and it is a huge fallacy to believe that things work 100% or 0%, nothing in between (rarely the case in medicine).
Results are actionable on many ways. Most important, screening for female partners, informed risk for partners or your on safety for ones partners (condoms BTW reduce infection rates, but do not fully protect, as HPV can be on other parts of skin).
[1]
> The overall prevalence of HPV was 65.4%. HPV detection was highest at the penile shaft (49.9% for the full cohort and 47.9% for the subcohort of men with complete sampling), followed by the glans penis/coronal sulcus (35.8% and 32.8%) and scrotum (34.2% and 32.8%). Detection was lowest in urethra (10.1% and 10.2%) and semen (5.3% and 4.8%) samples. Exclusion of urethra, semen, and either perianal, scrotal, or anal samples resulted in a <5% reduction in prevalence.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3904649/
no reliable test for men, then
and even if it is reliable, its utility is limited
all leads to focusing solely on probability of exposure(s)
so far the comments are adding more vectors to understanding the situation, but nothing that fundamentally changes the user experience
I think the most insightful thing is that there are 9 HPV variants some of which someone wouldn't have exposure to so its worthwhile to get the vaccine anyway
but other than that, the situation is the same. for men's age the utility of the vaccine is based on probability alone, as its a waste of resources to even attempt checking for prior/current exposure
this is what I don't understand, why is it useless? there're multiple variants, vaccination could create reaction to a different part of the virus, etc.
> Unless you plan to remain completely celibate, you are likely to contract a strain.
There's a whole range of behaviors and HPV risk profiles between celibate and being a slut. Having one long term trusted sexual partner and not acting like a whore would reduce HPV risk more than a vaccine. Worked for thousands of years.
You're replying on a post that shows a literal >16x reduction in prevalence, with "just don't be a slut, worked for thousands of years".
I'd invite you to look up the prevalence of STDs during the most puritanical eras and places, maybe you'd change that stupid take.
Is there any issue for adult males vaccinating ? I seem to remember some mention of risk by my doctor when I asked about it, but I might be misremembering.
No vaccine is without risk, but the vaccine approach is based on that risk being so low (but not zero) in comparison to the risk of not vaccinating that it is vastly the better choice.
Ok that was a bad question, let me rephrase: isn't there something particularly bad about this one for males that are already adults that makes it not recommended by doctors by default?
There is currently no vaccine that is zero risk
and in the same breathe, the risk is closer to zero than not.
Life is generally not zero risk :)
I believe you are right. Including amorous congress and vaccines
> While it won't clear an existing infection, it protects against different strains and reinfection (typically body removed HPV in 1-2 years). See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38137661/
The study you've quoted here is not definitive evidence of the claim you're making, and that claim is...let's just say that it's controversial. Conventional wisdom is that you're unlikely to benefit from HPV vaccination unless you have not already seroconverted for at least one of the 9 strains (6, 11, 16, 18, 31, 33, 45, 52, 58) in the current vaccine.
There's not much hard evidence to suggest that vaccination for HPV has strong ability to protect you from a strain after you've already been infected with that strain [1], as the best available data shows a substantial decline in efficacy for women over age 26 and for women of any age who had prior documented infection [2]. This study is small, unrandomized, and the measured primary outcome (anti-HPV IgG) doesn't really tell you anything about relative effectiveness at clearing an infection. The only real evidence they advance for this claim is:
> Persistent HPV infection after vaccination was significantly less frequent in the nine-valent vaccinated group (23.5%) compared to the control group (88.9%; p < 0.001).
...but again, this is a small, unrandomized trial. We don't know how these 60 people differ from the typical HPV-positive case. You can't rely on this kind of observational data to claim causality.
Vaccination is great, but let's not exaggerate or spread inaccurate claims in a fit of pro-vaccine exuberance. The HPV vaccine has age range recommendations [3] for a reason.
[1] For the somewhat obvious reason that your immune system has already seen the virus.
[2] See tables 2 and 3 here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8706722/
It's also worth calling out table 4, which shows the (IMO bad) efficacy data for biological men, which is why I only talk about women, above, and why anyone who recommends vaccination without mentioning this factor is not being entirely forthright. Few people are rushing to give older men the HPV vaccine because it's not really supported by data!
[3] I believe the current guideline is under age 45 in the USA.
> - Sooner is better, but vaccination can be done at any age. Guidelines often lag behind, but vaccination makes sense even if you are currently HPV-positive.
However, the vaccination is expensive (~1k) and it is difficult to find doctors who will do non-recommended vaccinations for self-payers.
YCMV
> However, the vaccination is expensive (~1k)
Depends entirely on where you are and what your healthcare situation is. Mine cost me ~100eur.
This is ultimately an American site so you can assume 80%+ of comments come from a US background (I'm not American, I've just been here longer than I should have).
(even for rest-of-the-world topics)
Are there insurance plans that won't cover it? I know that a lot of plans love not paying for things but vaccines seem to be the one thing that they all at least seem fairly good at (at least in my experience).
I am currently getting the HPV series and I only had to pay my copay for the first appointment have nothing for the second one (I am assuming it will be the same for the third)
as an ordinary person, I see almost zero throat cancer cases in decades of living. Meanwhile pharma companies are working with Kaiser Health to constantly push new vaccines of all kinds, as if they are required. Bill Gates has fantasies of requiring vaccinations of hundreds of millions of people, and was formally barred from enacting in the US. I see a profit and power motive with weak, scared people acting as foot soldiers, and mercenary companies as professional actors. Bad, bad combinations IMHO.
"I know no-one who died from hunger, therefore hunger does not exist, famine is a scam."
A quick find: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Deaths_from_throat_ca...
Who is feeding you this? Vaccines are some of the most unambiguously positive things ever developed, they're an easy win.
+$100k per man vaccinated in effective economic outcomes (less cancer, longer lives, less debilitating conditions) for those who needed to hear this.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2759438/
Want to boost the economy massively at next to no cost? HPV vaccinations are incredible.
I don't think that's what the summary is saying.
My reading of the following is that the cost of each additional quality adjusted life year would be over $100,000, rather than that each vaccination prompts $100k in economic value
> Including preadolescent boys in a routine vaccination programme for preadolescent girls resulted in higher costs and benefits and generally had cost effectiveness ratios that exceeded $100 000 per QALY across a range of HPV related outcomes, scenarios for cervical cancer screening, and assumptions of vaccine efficacy and duration
Just a quick point as an American living in Denmark, one of the reasons government programs like this work so well is everything is delivered digitally. We have "e-boks" https://en.digst.dk/systems/digital-post/about-the-national-... official government facilitated inboxes so when they need to notify you of vaccinations or whatever else, it arrives to your inbox. And basically 100% of residents use these systems.
I fail to see how e-boks makes this work. Younger people check their e-boks less frequently than average, so sending a physical letter to their address would work just as well if not better.
What makes it work is the public registers.
e-boks sends a text message to the phone, so I see it much faster than a paper mail.
e-boks is like gmail (and others) in that it keeps your old mail. So you can easily find old stuff, a great improvement on paper mail.
I don't even check my physical mailbox once a week.
Denmark is one of the very most digital countries. Physical mail is very much on the way out. We no longer has mailboxes to send mail, you have to go to a shop to send letters, which now cost at last $6 per letter due to the low amount of mail sent.
It is only a matter of less than 10 years before letters will be fully gone.
Thats all besides the point. Which was that e-boks is not making vaccine programs possible or successful.
Okay, well Ireland has similar vaccination rates, broader childhood vaccination coverage, and no central medical records at all, so while e-boks may assist administration, it's certainly not necessary.
> no central medical records at all
Which is bad, we definitely should have them. Referral data appears to be managed through Healthlink, which may just be a privatised not always used medical record system.
I'm a proponent of EHRs but not necessarily of centralised medical records, which have not been shown to improve outcomes and which do impose serious privacy risks on patients.
HealthLink is a messaging system and stores no EHRs at all. eHealth is the National EHR programme aiming to roll out EHRs by 2030 nationwide.
It will be a no-opt-out centralised EHR and combined social care record.
It has really been a great success in Denmark.
In the 1960s, more than 900 people were diagnosed with cervical cancer each year, corresponding to more than 40 cases per 100,000 Danes.
Today, that number is below 10 per 100,000 nationwide – and among women aged 20 to 29, only 3 out of 100,000 are affected. This is below the WHO’s threshold for elimination of the disease.
Lots of viruses are really oncogenic. The real success here is the ability of Denmark to track effectiveness. It sounds crazy but most countries do not have electronic health record capability to measure the effect of many interventions at population scale. Once good EHRs are rolled out, we will be able to double down on effective interventions, like this one, and vice versa.
"Lots of viruses are really oncogenic."
Hmm. Compared to what measurement? Most viruses are actually not oncogenic.
From cancer causes, oncogenic viruses are thought to be responsible for about 12% of human cancers worldwide:
https://www.mdpi.com/2079-7737/14/7/797
From what I remember, most viruses are not oncogenic in nature, so I am unsure whether the statement made is correct.
Sadly, no matter how good the data is, some societies will value opinions of uninformed celebrities above facts and reason, leading to a resurgence of preventable diseases.
The numbers are quite solid. People who don't want to accept the numbers, need to come up with an explanation why the data can not be trusted. With regard to oncogenic HPV, I think the data is very convincing. To me it was a lot more convincing than the SARS covid datapoints (e. g. the media constantly shifted; I noticed this with regard to Sweden, which had a bad early data due to barely any protection of the elderly, but lateron it still had better data than e. g. Austria which went into lockdown - so Austria had worse data points than Sweden overall. Japan or Taiwan had excellent data points, so the respective governments were much better than either Sweden or Austria. The most incompetent politicans acted in Austria during that time, replacing facts with promo and propaganda. The data points, though, were always solid. I remember I compared this about weekly and it was interesting to me when Austria suddenly surpassed Sweden negatively; the media here in Austria critisized Sweden early on, but once Sweden outperformed Austria in a better, more positive manner, suddenly the media no longer reported that. Private media simply can not be trusted.)
These celebrities should serve some jailtime. Quackery is criminal, it kills people.
Agreed. But we should also stop enabling celebrities when they push popular agendas even if they are correct. For example, climate change.
Celebrities in general are quite dubous. See a certain actor suddenly promoting Palantir spysniffing on mankind. I decided that guy won't get a dime from me for the rest of my life - when actors suddenly become lobbyists for Evil, they need to not get any money from regular people really.
Idk the Danish approach of opennnes seems to be working for them. They acknowledge it isn't fully effective. They acknowledge that there may be a small risk of side effects. And they tell people it's worth it and to go take it.
"Since HPV vaccination was implemented in the Danish childhood vaccination programme in 2009, we have received 2,320 reports of suspected adverse reactions from HPV vaccines up to and including 2016. 1,023 of the reported adverse reactions have been categorised as serious. In the same period, 1,724,916 vaccine doses were sold. The reports related to HPV vaccination that we have classified as serious include reports of the condition Postural Orthostatic Tachycardi Syndrome (POTS), fainting, neurological symptoms and a number of diffuse symptoms, such as long-term headache, fatigue and stomach ache."
"The risk of cervical changes at an early stage was reduced by 73% among women born in 1993 and 1994, who had been vaccinated with the HPV vaccine compared with those who had not been vaccinated."
"The Danish Health Authority recommends that all girls are vaccinated against HPV at the age of 12. The Danish Health Authori- ty still estimates that the benefits of vaccination by far outweigh any possible adverse reactions from the vaccine."
https://laegemiddelstyrelsen.dk/en/sideeffects/side-effects-...
Its not like it wasn't without issues. You had the documentary from a state funded tv station that uncritically let people claim all kind of issues after getting the vaccine. It drastically lowered the uptake of the vaccine.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6288961/
> They acknowledge it isn't fully effective. They acknowledge that there may be a small risk of side effects. And they tell people it's worth it and to go take it.
Those are basic bits of knowledge that apply to most vaccinations.
The problem is that the quacks diminish the positive effects, exaggerate the negatives and engage in a campaign of fear mongering that costs some people (and in some cases lots of people, see COVID) their lives. They are not only clueless, they are malicious.
From Gwyneth Paltrow, JFK Jr, all the way to Donald Trump and a whole raft of others the damage is immense. I have a close family member who now is fully convinced of the healing power of crystals and there isn't a thing you can do to reason with people that have fallen into a trap like that.
But maybe you have fallen into a trap? Maybe believing in crystals is their own damn fault rather that jailing “influencers” for inducing wrong-think.
People are gullible. Those that prey on the gullible are culpable, the gullible have problems enough as it is.
I think those who advocate for censorship are gullible and have fallen for the bush-league trap of believing that the state is on your side and exists to benefit you.
No, I think this guy is right if you mention that one of the rare side effects of the HPV vaccine is chronic headaches then you are reducing vaccine uptake even if only over a short amount of time until new studies come out this is definitely worse for the population at hole and everyone involved should be thrown in jail for however long this guy thinks they should be thrown in jail for
Exhibit a: “not quackery”
Telling lies should never be criminalized, because there is no single trustworthy arbiter of truth.
This has nothing to do with vaccines. There is a very good reason that misinformation is, and should remain legal. This simply allows the person or group who gets to define what is or is not misinformation to arbitrarily imprison anyone doing publishing they don’t like.
You really need to think through the implications and consequences of censorship laws before advocating for them.
EHRs are definitely not necessary for health surveillance and many countries perform equally or better without centralised records.
I'm a proponent of EHRs, but the key value is at patient-level, not population level where other approaches perform equally well.
The data is IMO quite convincing. Harald zur Hausen pointed this out decades ago already; this is another data point that adds to the theory which back then he proposed was fairly new (not that viruses cause cancer, that is much older knowledge, but specifically the role of some HPV strains; Harald died about 2 years ago).
A comment with an article citing published medical literature on risks associated with this type of vaccine was flagged and hidden. Why? I don't know the author nor am I a medical doctor to understand the topic at depth, so it's a genuine question. Was it misleading? If so, how? That's what the comment was asking, actually, if there were counter-points to the text, which was favorable to live vaccines (e.g. shingles) but critical of those developed with other methods. Is there no merit to that? I genuinely don't know, and since it seems impossible to discuss the topic, it's hard to say.
I sometimes vouch for incorrectly flagged posts. You got me curious, so I took a look. What I found was a blog from an anonymous conspiracist vaccine opponent claiming to be a doctor. He's a decent writer but in my estimation a loon.
So I'm fine with it being flagged and decline to vouch for it.
> Infection with HPV types covered by the vaccine (HPV16/18) has been almost eliminated. Before vaccination, the prevalence of HPV16/18 was between 15–17%, which has decreased in vaccinated women to < 1% by 2021. However, about one-third of women still had HPV infection with non-vaccine high-risk HPV types, and new infections with these types were more frequent in vaccinated than in unvaccinated women.
I wonder if we'll those non-vaccine strains will eventually become the most prevalent.
Sounds like in countries like Denmark, they are already on their way to becoming the most prevalent.
Hope we'll develop vaccines against those too.
In my EU country Gardasil 9 is the most common HPV vaccine nowadays. This protects against 9 most common strains. I would assume the same is true in other countries. We have gone from HPV 16/18 -> +6/11 -> +31/33/45/52/58 protection with 2/4/9-valent vaccines.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPV_vaccine
At what age can you start getting vaccinated?
I don't know about Denmark, but the US CDC indicates that you can get the HPV vaccine starting at 9; with a recommendation do get it at 11 or 12.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/hpv/hcp/recommendations.htm...
Everyone already knows!
HPV vaccination leads to massive reduction in nasopharyngeal, penile and rectal cancer in men.
The focus of messaging around HPV vaccination on ovarian cancer, female fertility and the age limitations for recommendations / free vaccination in some places are nothing short of a massive public health failure and almost scandal.
Just truthfully tell the boys their dicks might fall off and see how all of them quicklky flock to the vaccine.
> Just truthfully tell the boys their dicks might fall off and see how all of them quicklky flock to the vaccine.
Every male above the age of 26 is locked out of the vaccine unless you pay out of pocket, which will be €300-€500 (or even higher).
It's led to this really weird situation, where HPV vaccination for men is now recommended up to 40s but only covered up to 26yr old, and that recommendation upgrade happened relatively recently. Which means there's a whole generation of men who are told they should get the vaccine, who would have had covered access to the vaccine in the past, but are now expected to go out of pocket.
Yep, I paid for mine. male/43/Spain. Almost €400. Two shots of the nonavalent vaccine, ~€190 each.
For younger people it's three shots (second after two months, third after 6 months of the first one), now for older (over 30s or 40s, I can't remember exactly) it's recommended to get two shots (second after six months).
This seems to be changing in some areas. I am in the US, in my 30's, Male and I only had my $30 copay for the first visit (nothing for my second shot)
You could probably have gotten away with it a decade ago but that is a very poor plan in the far more critical of public health world of today.
Statistically nobody even knows a guy who knows a guy who's dick fell off. Serious HPV problems for men are not even common enough to be viable urban legend. You have less to back up your DARE messaging than DARE did. It's just not gonna work. The nanosecond someone who took your bait shows up to be interviewed by some Youtube talking head about side effects the already severely damaged (compared to, IDK a decade ago) credibility of the medical establishment will go up in flames.
You need to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth and let people make their own decisions. People don't "trust the experts" anymore at the scale you need for stuff like vaccination campaigns so you have to operate based on that reality.
Apparently HPV is responsible for some ~70% of throat cancers and ~30% of penile cancers in men. Seems pretty significant to me.
If nobody knows a guy who knows a guy who had penile cancer, that's probably because people are very bad about talking about genital health. I'm sure some of the men in my life have issues with erectile dysfunction, enlarged prostates, hemmorrhoids, etc. But no one is talking about those issues.
70% of throat cancers? In a world with cigarettes and chewing tobacco? I find that a very surprising number - so surprising it's almost unbelievable.
Got a source?
Think of it as shared responsibility. The tobacco and the virus are both reasons why you got cancer and died, prizes for all.
So maybe 70% of throat cancer victims have HPV, and like 70% smoked - and if those were independent facts you'd expect that about 49% both smoked and had HPV, but it's actually more than half 'cos it turns out that if you have HPV then smoking is even worse. So that's nice.
"Currently, the estimated proportion of oropharyngeal cancers testing positive for HPV within the United States is 68%–70%"[0]
[0] https://www.asha.org/practice-portal/clinical-topics/head-an...
And how many men get throat and penile cancers vs other cancers and health issues? There's a reason old men crack jokes about prostate health, erectile dysfunction and incontinence rather than their dicks falling off and are way more worried about colon cancer than rectal cancer.
I didn't say it wasn't a significant source of cancer. I said that nobody knows a guy who knows a guy who's dick fell off or some other extreme outcome. Without enough of that to back up your messaging it just won't work. You need to be honest with people, not try and scare them like you're trying to keep school kids from smoking weed in 1990.
The public messaging you're trying to engage in could perhaps have skated by in a less critical time but in the current environment it will be counterproductive.
I don't want my kid or my grandkid to get measles or some other "of immediate consequence" disease because they go to school with a bunch of unvaccinated kids because you people sullied the reputation of public health via "just push the truth a little, it'll make them take the vaccine" type endeavors.
> "you people"
JFC. I'm checking out of this conversation.
Do the conspiracy theorists believe it or not?