If you're living in the US: please consider getting the vaccine, ragardless of your age. It was covered by my (rather shitty) health insurance. It consists of just 2 (EDIT: 3 for adults!) doses. It is recommended for both Males and Females.
It's not approved for those over 45. (AFIAK, simply because so few people in that age group would have risk without having had prior exposure. Basically only those who had divorced or lost their long time partner.)
This is mostly guesswork but I think you need to get the vaccine before you catch it and lots of people have it as they get older.
If you have a limited supply the greater bang per buck would be to start with the young people who almost certainly haven't caught it yet and then work your way up.
> Why is there an age limit on an all encompassing vax
Vaccines are subject to stringent safety standards since they’re administered to healthy people. The age limit may suggest that at the time of the recommendation, in the relevant jurisdiction, the manufacturer had not studied its safety and efficacy in >40 year olds.
(I also don’t think it’s an age limit as much as the upper end of a recommendation.)
It's an age limit to the approval caused by a lack of studies. To study it in over 45s you need suitable over 45s--but there aren't a lot of over 45s with risk but not prior exposure.
HPV tests are of low value (as an adult, if ever sexually active, you likely have it but can do nothing about it); a new biomarker test that can detect the cancers is being developed [1]. Ongoing cancer surveillance is all you can do once exposed without having been vaccinated (and if cancer occurs, immunotherapy).
As pm90 wrote, I strongly recommend getting vaccinated [2] unless a doctor tells you otherwise, even if you already have HPV or have had previous potential exposure.
“The route of HPV transmission is primarily through skin-to-skin or skin-to-mucosa contact. Sexual transmission is the most documented, but there have been studies suggesting non-sexual courses.
The horizontal transfer of HPV includes fomites, fingers, and mouth, skin contact (other than sexual). Self-inoculation is described in studies as a potential HPV transmission route, as it was certified in female virgins, and in children with genital warts (low-risk HPV) without a personal history of sexual abuse. Vertical transmission from mother to child is another HPV transfer course” [1].
Yes. While direct genital contact is the highest probability way to spread it, any skin-skin, skin-mucosa, skin-object-skin contact can potentially spread it. Consider how much you trust others to wash their hands after using the restroom. Low probability, but possible.
You’ve got a low probability of getting polio, but there’s no reason not to be vaccinated if you can.
Even if you already have a strain, there are multiple types. In fact, people who got a vaccine early on, should consider an updated shot for more complete protection.
The protection from the vaccines lasts (probably) a lifetime, and HPV is quite widespread because it is: very easily communicable, and infections linger for potentially long periods of time without any obvious symptoms
Something like 80% of people are sexually active at all will be infected with HPV at some point. You may not have been sexually active, but your future partners may have been. I personally have a friend who went through stage 4 cancer contracted from her (now ex) husband.
So, of course not literally everyone needs to take it, assess your own risks, but it's quite an easy, highly effective vaccine: don't overthink it.
Rape, you might become sexually active in the future, and although sexual transmission is the most common way, there are some other ways to get infected.
Unless you're never sexually active (meaning, you eventually do have sex), it's worthwhile getting since there is a risk to yourself if you get infected.
I went to my local megacorp pharmacy out here in California, and asked about the COVID vaccine that’s no longer recommended by our anti-vaxxer overlords.
Apparently, it’s about as easy to get as an old-school medical marijuana card.
Results vary by state though. No need to travel to Canada or Mexico (yet).
- the Vaccine Mafia that tried to cut my surgeon wife's hospital privileges for not getting the covid vaxx to which she had a well-documented medical allergy in the middle of a high risk pregnancy.
The goal wasn't to eliminate the HPV strains, it was to decrease cervical cancer. Has Denmark encountered a drop in cervical cancer? If so, that's a great outcome!
The lead time from infection to cancer is very long, we would not expect to see too much of a drop *yet*. But testing for those strains seems to be as useful for screening as a pap smear.
> "Details of the Gardasil litigation show how Kennedy took action beyond sowing doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines in the court of public opinion and helped build a case against the pharmaceutical industry before judges and juries."
> "Kennedy, a longtime plaintiffs' lawyer, became involved in the Gardasil litigation in 2018 in collaboration with Robert Krakow, an attorney specializing in vaccine injury cases, Krakow said"
I remember this being a big controversy in Texas in the 2000s. Our Republican governor, forcing girls to get the vaccine! What does he think Texan girls are, lusty?
Not like disease prevention is a universally good thing and some people tend to have sex.
At the end of the day, religious radicals like STDs because it enforces their worldview that having multiple sexual partners in a lifetime is a sin.
That's really interesting, and from that I would assume that the risk of cervical (or other cancers) from HPV is associated with how often someone is reinfected? ie, someone who got HPV once in college doesn't have HPV their whole life? And potentially has a lower cancer risk than someone who is repeatedly re-infected?
It's incredibly prevalent, but most people clear it within a couple years, and won't even know that they had it. The time to clear it is just variable and depends on your body's immune response, the longer you go without clearing it the higher the cancer risk.
In a sense no, hence the choice to vaccinate younger children who will mostly not be sexually active yet.
But because the modern versions of these vaccines cover many strains (initial vaccines were two, Denmark chose a 4 way vaccine, now a nine way) it's very possible that you get a meaningful benefit by being protected from say six strains your body has never seen, even though the three it has already seen wouldn't be prevented.
I've heard of it being administered post exposure as a way to help the body fight the existing infection. Seemed a little odd when I first heard it as HPV should clear on it's own.
In Denmark you can. I was in my mid thirties when I went to my doctor to ask them to prescribe it. Before each shot I would go to the pharmacy and buy one dose and go to the doctor to have them administer it for me (if I wanted to). At that time I think it was free for teenage girls, now it's free for teenage boys as well.
The evolution of who gets HPV vaccines is really interesting. At first it was young women, as vaccinating young men had a very marginal decrease in cervical cancer rates via indirect protection (which itself is a function of how many young women are vaccinated). Then as HPV infection was linked to more cancers, vaccinating young men crossed the cost-effectiveness thresholds many governments use.
Vaccinating older populations is similarly just a less clear-cut case, but it's a cost-effectiveness argument, not one purely driven by if the vaccine offers protection.
Generally yes. I asked my primary care physician and would have been able to get the vaccine dose from the pharmacy (paying for it myself) and she would have administered it.
And even before the antivax nutters here went from fringe to a significant social force, HPV vaccines were already being decried for "promoting casual sex." Our culture is so broken in so many ways.
Also, forget "She might die of cancer" just exactly how bad is it if your daughter is a whore ? What else are we ruling out, independent business owner, politician ?
What happened to "I just want my children to be happy" ?
Of course, I for sure held off on having casual unprotected sex with multiple partners as a teenager because I was worried about contracting HPV, but thanks to Gardasil my slut era was legendary and enduring.
Maybe we’re seeing selection pressure against those prone to addictive cycles of social-media influenced misinformation?
Like, anti-vaxers died at higher rates in Covid [1]. This will continue across disease outbreaks, particularly ones for which we have near-comprehensive vaccines like measles. And given antivax sensibility is heritable (through parenting, not genes), one would expect this to stabilize the population over several generations to one that doesn’t have this defect.
This is now a global problem. The guy who started it, Andrew Wakefield, is British, and we have long had antivaxxers in Europe too.
Prior to Covid, the antivaxx scene was vaguely left-and-green oriented, biomoms, vegans and other "very natural" people; you would expect them to vote for Greens or even more alternative parties. This changed abruptly and now the antivaxx scene is mostly rightwing, but the common base is still the same distrust.
I wonder if this is the price we pay for radical informational transparency. Nowadays, democratic countries with reasonable freedom of press cannot really prevent their own fuckups from surfacing in the worst possible way. Some people react by complete rejection of anything that comes from "official" channels and become ripe for manipulation from other actors.
> I wonder if this is the price we pay for radical informational transparency. Nowadays, democratic countries with reasonable freedom of press cannot really prevent their own fuckups from surfacing in the worst possible way. Some people react by complete rejection of anything that comes from "official" channels and become ripe for manipulation from other actors.
Such people have always existed, unfortunately. I don't think it's a result of anything particularly new.
The people existed, but a portable always-running conveyor belt of bad news that is addictive enough to make them glued to the screen did not.
In the 1990s, you had maybe 15 minutes a day on average to consume news, either from a paper newspaper, or from an evening TV relation. Now, quite a lot of people spend 20 times as much time doomscrolling. Of course the impact will be much more massive.
Sure, but this implies the only source of "manipulation from other actors" is the news, media, or government. Churches, cults, and just other ignorant people existed to cause distrust in authority.
I'm not denying that there's a difference - obviously technology has enabled the scale of things to grow quite a bit, both good and bad - but it's beside my point, which is that, given that it's not a new phenomenon, blaming it on technology seems doomed to failure. Without solving for the underlying issues, people will continue to mistrust authority, whether they're being told to by news or their neighbor.
Mistrusting authority might be good. What I see happening is in fact trusting too much into "authority" without penalizing it for inconsistencies - I would call it more like blind faith. I feel this happens because it makes it easier than questioning everything you hear and deciding for yourself, and accepting you might be wrong, or that the information is unknown. People want a savior and a simple solution!
> blaming it on technology seems doomed to failure
Recognizing that technology is now so convenient, psychology manipulative, and operates in a furiously fast feedback evolutionary regime, and that it has radically increased the spread of cultural irrationality isn't about "blame" in a judgy moral way.
It is about characterizing major factors behind the problem.
The enormous amount of near instant coordinated (by intention or dynamic), interactive misinformation, made so conveniently available that large percentages of the population routinely expose themselves to it, participate in reinforcing it, throughout their typical day, is very new.
> "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." -- James Baldwin
That's a little like saying nuclear bombs aren't a technology, but a human problem. And you bet, they sure are, but it's a lot harder to wipe out everyone, if the nutjobs in your community just have a pointed stick.
And 'nutjobs' may be pejorative, but I'll hold on to it as apt. At the same time I assign no blame, for it is an issue of cognition. The best way I can describe it is, intelligence is not a single factor. And it's not even a few factors. It's a massive bar graph, with 1000s upon 1000s of bars, each delineating a different aspect of intelligence.
A lucky few may score high on all those bars, yet even the most intelligent of us tend to score high on only some of those bars. And my point is, I've seen people immensely intelligent on some of those bars, yet astonishingly deficient on others.
We love to make fun of politicians, so I'll use one as an example here. Politicians tend to be incredibly personable, and very difficult to dislike in person. They exude congeniality, they read you like a book, and can often orate your wallet completely out of your pocket, and you'll thank them for it too. It's how they managed to go so far politically, yet some of these same politicians have severe and massive deficiencies in cognition.
Back to the pointed sticks, and the nutjobs who would wield them pre-tech, these people are simply as they are. Yet in the past, you'd see one nutjob in a community, and they'd be surrounded by normalcy, it would temper them, mitigate their effect, sand off their edges so to speak.
Yet as our communities grew in size and scope, these individuals could finally meet more of their ilk. A large city might have dozens of them, larger still cities hundreds, and they'd meet up. And as technology grew, and access to the printing press become possible for all, and for less and less cost, these same people could then send their madness in newsletter form to even those small communities where maybe only one nutjob existed.
But those people needed to still connect in some way. Maybe through an ad in the back of a magazine, or something akin yet far less gated by 'normals'.
Yet today? Now? Algorithms match you up with all those nutjobs. Where before you might live in isolation, and the friends you had might scoff at that weird idea you have, now you've found a community of hundreds, or thousands just like you! And they all affirm your madness, they pat you on the back, they congratulate you for seeing the light! They whisper all those sweet nothings into your ear, all those secret things you knew were true, and they listen to all you say on the subject.
For the first time in your life you have a home, a community, and before TikTok, or some weird forum, it would have never all been possible. You'd have been isolated, even in the age of magazines, and print, for you'd have never found one another.
And worse, now profit enters the system. Those who would steal, or thieve, or build bridges with sub-standard concrete for profit, or anything for money regardless of cost to us all, appear on this scene. They see those nutjobs, and they seek to profit from them. They own youtube, or tiktok channels, and often do not believe in anything but profit. They'll tell you anything you want to hear, espouse any crazy idea, and like that bridge built with substandard concrete, they'll take the money and run as society collapses around them.
This profit motive was always there, see cults. Yet the reach and scope was just not what it is today, there is so much more range given to a single person now.
People have had a mistrust in authority as far back as when nomadic tribes were the norm but somebody had to decide where to hunt or gather that day or to move on. Good luck changing human nature.
Chatty Kathy could only share her moonbat ideas with a couple people at a time. Now she has a TikTok and the ability to go viral. Even folks sharing her video to mock it are spreading her message.
Measles is highly infectious, you need a very high percentage of the population immune in order to maintain herd immunity. So long as you have herd immunity the only source of infection is travel--but note that this works both ways. It's much more likely to be Americans catching it while traveling than immigrants bringing it. They at least used to trace the original case in such outbreaks, it was normally someone who had been abroad.
We saw the same thing with Covid--quarantine against Chinese people, while ignoring Americans returning from the very same places even when they said they had symptoms. (And irrelevant besides, the strain from Europe quickly dominated.)
Especially ironic given how hard a number of South American countries are having eliminating the MMR diseases due to import cases from Europe and the U.S.
Although you are (as I understand) right, the question itself is valid, lots of diseases spread to species other than the one that is in the name… Chickenpox, monkeypox, swine flu, or even the Spanish flu.
It turns out a human body has a lot of surfaces facing the "outside" in some sense and we forget about the parts we can't see. Most of this surface is not covered in what we'd conventionally consider skin. It's bit like if you were looking at surfaces in a house and forgot the walls and ceiling.
There are people who will do the right thing, there will be people who you can teach to do the right thing, and there will be people who will ignore you no matter what. Optimize for the first two. "Pick better parents" is unfortunately unactionable advice.
Australia has almost eradicated cervical cancer through HPV vaccination efforts, other countries will get there as a function of uptake and cohort replacement. There is a recently developed blood test that can detect the biomarkers from HPV related cancers years before they would traditionally be diagnosed, but prevention via vaccination remains key.
Shaming the current administration and pointing out their lies until we are out of breath is still a worthwhile endeavor. In this age of social media a good gotcha that goes viral can tank an election. With the midterms coming up in a year I’m hopeful.
It will continue to be necessary because there are more strains of HPV than those that are targeted by vaccines.
The way this article is broken into sections is a bit misleading - the recommendation for cervical cancer hasn't been annual screening for a long time. This is acknowledged in the text, but even there is unclear.
"Despite this good news, roughly one third of women screened during the study period still had infection with high-risk HPV types not covered by the original vaccines – and new infections with these types were more frequent among vaccinated women, compared to unvaccinated ones."
Not to mention the unavoidable side effects that every injection causes.
Is there a net positive benefit to this shot, other than to GAVI and the manufacturer's bottom line ? Nobody knows.
That's because other strains weren't covered by the original vaccines: Strains 16 and 18 were the high risk strains covered in the 2008 roll-out, the roll-out to young girls of the broader vaccine covering other high risk strains didn't start until 2017.
“In 2017, one of the first birth cohorts of women in Denmark who were HPV-vaccinated as teenage girls in 2008 reached the screening age of 23 years,” Nonboe explained."
It will take several more years to see the effects on other strains. It seems to have been wildly successful so far.
1. There's still overall fewer infections from high risk HPV types in these women.
2. It needs to be confirmed in ~10 years, but it seems very likely that women given the shots that protect against all high risk HPV types will see almost no infections from them.
That study is small, observation based and controversial, and the researchers have data from a randomized follow up study that they have been keeping secret for the last 14 years. The coverage of the controversy has mostly been in Danish media, despite these hacks advising the current US administration. See https://www.sensible-med.com/p/the-false-narrative-of-nonspe... for a writeup in English.
Not my field but just looking at that I see variations as big as the signal they are supposedly detecting. Looks an awful lot like noise.
And note that it's possible for a vaccine to have a negative survival benefit yet be a good idea--in a population with herd immunity a vaccine provides little benefit to those who receive it so long as enough people receive it to provide the herd immunity. But if too many don't get it the risk from not getting it goes up considerably. Look at what has been happening with measles--measles was basically unheard of, the quacks said not to vaccinate (remember, Wakefield was attacking a specific vaccine that he stood to profit from the controversy, Worm Brain doesn't believe in infectious disease in the first place), now we have people dying of measles.
> Other vaccines, for example DTP, have been shown to cause higher long term mortality rate
Sure. This one hasn’t.
That said, I frankly think people should be free to vaccinate as they please, and cities, states and private businesses free to include and exclude folks based on vaccination status as they please. (I’m also in favor of letting insurance companies choose if they want to cover diseases someone chose to get by going unvaccinated.)
That is exactly why we need to apply the precautionary principle for new drugs like this one.
> That said, I frankly think people should be free to vaccinate as they please
Never said they shouldn't be. Just need to be skeptical of organizations like GAVI and their PR, as they have a huge conflict of interest in promoting and profiting from these drugs.
If you're living in the US: please consider getting the vaccine, ragardless of your age. It was covered by my (rather shitty) health insurance. It consists of just 2 (EDIT: 3 for adults!) doses. It is recommended for both Males and Females.
It's not approved for those over 45. (AFIAK, simply because so few people in that age group would have risk without having had prior exposure. Basically only those who had divorced or lost their long time partner.)
And note i believe they just increased the recommended age of administration up to ~40yo? Throat cancer sucks. Get the vax.
Why is there an age limit on an all encompassing vax, wasn't the famous posterchild for this disease Michael Douglas?
This is mostly guesswork but I think you need to get the vaccine before you catch it and lots of people have it as they get older.
If you have a limited supply the greater bang per buck would be to start with the young people who almost certainly haven't caught it yet and then work your way up.
> Why is there an age limit on an all encompassing vax
Vaccines are subject to stringent safety standards since they’re administered to healthy people. The age limit may suggest that at the time of the recommendation, in the relevant jurisdiction, the manufacturer had not studied its safety and efficacy in >40 year olds.
(I also don’t think it’s an age limit as much as the upper end of a recommendation.)
It's an age limit to the approval caused by a lack of studies. To study it in over 45s you need suitable over 45s--but there aren't a lot of over 45s with risk but not prior exposure.
It's likely that they haven't tested it as thoroughly in older folks and that most older folks have already been exposed to HPV.
To be blunt: Cost-effectiveness.
Any way to test for previous exposure? I'd be pretty surprised if I didn't already have antibodies. I suppose it doesn't matter though.
HPV tests are of low value (as an adult, if ever sexually active, you likely have it but can do nothing about it); a new biomarker test that can detect the cancers is being developed [1]. Ongoing cancer surveillance is all you can do once exposed without having been vaccinated (and if cancer occurs, immunotherapy).
As pm90 wrote, I strongly recommend getting vaccinated [2] unless a doctor tells you otherwise, even if you already have HPV or have had previous potential exposure.
[1] Circulating tumor human papillomavirus DNA whole genome sequencing enables human papillomavirus-associated oropharynx cancer early detection - https://academic.oup.com/jnci/advance-article-abstract/doi/1... | https://doi.org/10.1093/jnci/djaf249
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPV_vaccine
(had three doses in my 30s via Planned Parenthood)
Doctor recommended it to me when I was almost 30. So yeah, I'd say still go for it.
Note that the modern vaccine covers 9 different strains.
Not sure but theres zero downside to getting it
If you’re not sexually active, is it still worth doing?
Yes.
“The route of HPV transmission is primarily through skin-to-skin or skin-to-mucosa contact. Sexual transmission is the most documented, but there have been studies suggesting non-sexual courses.
The horizontal transfer of HPV includes fomites, fingers, and mouth, skin contact (other than sexual). Self-inoculation is described in studies as a potential HPV transmission route, as it was certified in female virgins, and in children with genital warts (low-risk HPV) without a personal history of sexual abuse. Vertical transmission from mother to child is another HPV transfer course” [1].
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7579832/
Yes. While direct genital contact is the highest probability way to spread it, any skin-skin, skin-mucosa, skin-object-skin contact can potentially spread it. Consider how much you trust others to wash their hands after using the restroom. Low probability, but possible.
You’ve got a low probability of getting polio, but there’s no reason not to be vaccinated if you can.
Even if you already have a strain, there are multiple types. In fact, people who got a vaccine early on, should consider an updated shot for more complete protection.
The protection from the vaccines lasts (probably) a lifetime, and HPV is quite widespread because it is: very easily communicable, and infections linger for potentially long periods of time without any obvious symptoms
Something like 80% of people are sexually active at all will be infected with HPV at some point. You may not have been sexually active, but your future partners may have been. I personally have a friend who went through stage 4 cancer contracted from her (now ex) husband.
So, of course not literally everyone needs to take it, assess your own risks, but it's quite an easy, highly effective vaccine: don't overthink it.
Life is long and unpredictable, while the cost is very low.
If you ever intend to be, yes.
Yes.
Why?
Rape, you might become sexually active in the future, and although sexual transmission is the most common way, there are some other ways to get infected.
Unless you're never sexually active (meaning, you eventually do have sex), it's worthwhile getting since there is a risk to yourself if you get infected.
rape
Huh.
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> It consists of just 2 doses.
Wasn't it 3 doses before?
you're right its 3, updated message
If you live outside of the US, you should get vaccine too. Even one dose is effective.
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/ivac/the-power-of-a-single-dose...
I went to my local megacorp pharmacy out here in California, and asked about the COVID vaccine that’s no longer recommended by our anti-vaxxer overlords.
Apparently, it’s about as easy to get as an old-school medical marijuana card.
Results vary by state though. No need to travel to Canada or Mexico (yet).
Kaiser is continuing to cover it for everyone.
if you're looking at fault look no further than:
- the Vaccine Mafia that tried to cut my surgeon wife's hospital privileges for not getting the covid vaxx to which she had a well-documented medical allergy in the middle of a high risk pregnancy.
... did you finish the series? I think for adults it should be 3 doses. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/hpv/hcp/administration.html
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Once the libs chose the anti-disease side I suppose the right had no choice but to be pro-disease.
Enjoy your warts
Restrict your partners to Danes and you are unlikely to contract it.
>I'd rather take my chances with the actual disease at this point..
Gross, @DaSHacka. Absolutely vile.
The goal wasn't to eliminate the HPV strains, it was to decrease cervical cancer. Has Denmark encountered a drop in cervical cancer? If so, that's a great outcome!
> it was to decrease cervical cancer
HPV can cause cancers in the cervix, vulva, vagina, penis, anus and back of the throat [1].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/hpv/about/cancers-caused-by-hpv.html
The lead time from infection to cancer is very long, we would not expect to see too much of a drop *yet*. But testing for those strains seems to be as useful for screening as a pap smear.
This seems to have some data that suggests they have seen a decline: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ijc.35081
There's a chart about 2/3 down the page that shows a drop in several age groups, and a particularly striking drop in the 20-29 age group: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/cms/asset/fd3e820c-4610-4c4e...
> The goal wasn't to eliminate the HPV strains
Those monsters. Don't they know those viruses have a right to live?
Why is this getting downvoted? It's obviously humor!
More importantly, it does not add to the conversation. If humor alone is what you want, head to Reddit.
Humor is welcome here, but it needs to have some substance behind it.
Because HN is not really a forum geared towards sarcastic quips unless they are extraordinarily funny.
By way of contrast, America's current top "doctor" organized a class-action lawsuit against the HPV vaccine.
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/... ("Kennedy played key role in Gardasil vaccine case against Merck")
> "Details of the Gardasil litigation show how Kennedy took action beyond sowing doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines in the court of public opinion and helped build a case against the pharmaceutical industry before judges and juries."
> "Kennedy, a longtime plaintiffs' lawyer, became involved in the Gardasil litigation in 2018 in collaboration with Robert Krakow, an attorney specializing in vaccine injury cases, Krakow said"
We have the first leaders.
I remember this being a big controversy in Texas in the 2000s. Our Republican governor, forcing girls to get the vaccine! What does he think Texan girls are, lusty?
Not like disease prevention is a universally good thing and some people tend to have sex.
At the end of the day, religious radicals like STDs because it enforces their worldview that having multiple sexual partners in a lifetime is a sin.
It's okay, he'll have us treat cervical cancer with a juice cleanse and vibes.
Does the vaccine benefit you if you've already been infected?
There are multiple strains of HPV and most people haven't been infected with all of the strains.
from https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/by_th...
Potentially, yes. HPV infections are cleared over time, and there are many strains of HPV.
That's really interesting, and from that I would assume that the risk of cervical (or other cancers) from HPV is associated with how often someone is reinfected? ie, someone who got HPV once in college doesn't have HPV their whole life? And potentially has a lower cancer risk than someone who is repeatedly re-infected?
Am I understanding that correctly?
https://www.hpvworld.com/articles/the-frequency-of-hpv-infec...
It's incredibly prevalent, but most people clear it within a couple years, and won't even know that they had it. The time to clear it is just variable and depends on your body's immune response, the longer you go without clearing it the higher the cancer risk.
> someone who got HPV once in college doesn't have HPV their whole life?
Doesn't necessarily have HPV their whole life - time-to-clearance is somewhat variable.
And yes, both slower clearance and just more infections are both associated with increased risk.
In a sense no, hence the choice to vaccinate younger children who will mostly not be sexually active yet.
But because the modern versions of these vaccines cover many strains (initial vaccines were two, Denmark chose a 4 way vaccine, now a nine way) it's very possible that you get a meaningful benefit by being protected from say six strains your body has never seen, even though the three it has already seen wouldn't be prevented.
It should be noted that the decision to vaccinate younger children is a combination of disease prevention and cost, not just vaccine effectiveness.
I've heard of it being administered post exposure as a way to help the body fight the existing infection. Seemed a little odd when I first heard it as HPV should clear on it's own.
The key is you want it to clear as quickly as possible.
And I can't get the shot in Germany because I'm "too old" and just assumed to be infected with it already, anyway.
What a great system.
Can you pay for it?
In Denmark you can. I was in my mid thirties when I went to my doctor to ask them to prescribe it. Before each shot I would go to the pharmacy and buy one dose and go to the doctor to have them administer it for me (if I wanted to). At that time I think it was free for teenage girls, now it's free for teenage boys as well.
The evolution of who gets HPV vaccines is really interesting. At first it was young women, as vaccinating young men had a very marginal decrease in cervical cancer rates via indirect protection (which itself is a function of how many young women are vaccinated). Then as HPV infection was linked to more cancers, vaccinating young men crossed the cost-effectiveness thresholds many governments use.
Vaccinating older populations is similarly just a less clear-cut case, but it's a cost-effectiveness argument, not one purely driven by if the vaccine offers protection.
Generally yes. I asked my primary care physician and would have been able to get the vaccine dose from the pharmacy (paying for it myself) and she would have administered it.
Good news.
Bad news is that many countries came close to wiping out measles et al. too, but it takes sustained effort to keep things like that.
Amazing how badly the United States is regressing. Literally measles is making a comeback due to idiots like RFK.
And even before the antivax nutters here went from fringe to a significant social force, HPV vaccines were already being decried for "promoting casual sex." Our culture is so broken in so many ways.
"Why haven't you cured cancer yet?"
"We have a vaccine to prevent some very serious cancers."
"But it might turn my daughter into a hussy."
Also, forget "She might die of cancer" just exactly how bad is it if your daughter is a whore ? What else are we ruling out, independent business owner, politician ?
What happened to "I just want my children to be happy" ?
I always thought "Cervical cancer is a just punishment for my daughter's mistakes" (leaving aside if it is a mistake) was horrific.
Of course, I for sure held off on having casual unprotected sex with multiple partners as a teenager because I was worried about contracting HPV, but thanks to Gardasil my slut era was legendary and enduring.
Teenagers are notorious for making decisions based on consequences that are decades away from manifesting.
Maybe we’re seeing selection pressure against those prone to addictive cycles of social-media influenced misinformation?
Like, anti-vaxers died at higher rates in Covid [1]. This will continue across disease outbreaks, particularly ones for which we have near-comprehensive vaccines like measles. And given antivax sensibility is heritable (through parenting, not genes), one would expect this to stabilize the population over several generations to one that doesn’t have this defect.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10123459/
This is now a global problem. The guy who started it, Andrew Wakefield, is British, and we have long had antivaxxers in Europe too.
Prior to Covid, the antivaxx scene was vaguely left-and-green oriented, biomoms, vegans and other "very natural" people; you would expect them to vote for Greens or even more alternative parties. This changed abruptly and now the antivaxx scene is mostly rightwing, but the common base is still the same distrust.
I wonder if this is the price we pay for radical informational transparency. Nowadays, democratic countries with reasonable freedom of press cannot really prevent their own fuckups from surfacing in the worst possible way. Some people react by complete rejection of anything that comes from "official" channels and become ripe for manipulation from other actors.
> I wonder if this is the price we pay for radical informational transparency. Nowadays, democratic countries with reasonable freedom of press cannot really prevent their own fuckups from surfacing in the worst possible way. Some people react by complete rejection of anything that comes from "official" channels and become ripe for manipulation from other actors.
Such people have always existed, unfortunately. I don't think it's a result of anything particularly new.
The people existed, but a portable always-running conveyor belt of bad news that is addictive enough to make them glued to the screen did not.
In the 1990s, you had maybe 15 minutes a day on average to consume news, either from a paper newspaper, or from an evening TV relation. Now, quite a lot of people spend 20 times as much time doomscrolling. Of course the impact will be much more massive.
Back then we had the National Enquirer and Weekly World News and similar for all the obscure conspiracy news you wanted.
I think that the social media is much more capable of turning various fence sitters and borderline cases into full blown conspiracy believers.
Unlike the paper products, which just lie around when not actively seeked for, the algorithms determining your feed have a lot more agency.
Sure, but this implies the only source of "manipulation from other actors" is the news, media, or government. Churches, cults, and just other ignorant people existed to cause distrust in authority.
Those organizations didn't have instantaneous global reach. Now everyone does.
I'm not denying that there's a difference - obviously technology has enabled the scale of things to grow quite a bit, both good and bad - but it's beside my point, which is that, given that it's not a new phenomenon, blaming it on technology seems doomed to failure. Without solving for the underlying issues, people will continue to mistrust authority, whether they're being told to by news or their neighbor.
Mistrusting authority might be good. What I see happening is in fact trusting too much into "authority" without penalizing it for inconsistencies - I would call it more like blind faith. I feel this happens because it makes it easier than questioning everything you hear and deciding for yourself, and accepting you might be wrong, or that the information is unknown. People want a savior and a simple solution!
> blaming it on technology seems doomed to failure
Recognizing that technology is now so convenient, psychology manipulative, and operates in a furiously fast feedback evolutionary regime, and that it has radically increased the spread of cultural irrationality isn't about "blame" in a judgy moral way.
It is about characterizing major factors behind the problem.
The enormous amount of near instant coordinated (by intention or dynamic), interactive misinformation, made so conveniently available that large percentages of the population routinely expose themselves to it, participate in reinforcing it, throughout their typical day, is very new.
> "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." -- James Baldwin
That's a little like saying nuclear bombs aren't a technology, but a human problem. And you bet, they sure are, but it's a lot harder to wipe out everyone, if the nutjobs in your community just have a pointed stick.
And 'nutjobs' may be pejorative, but I'll hold on to it as apt. At the same time I assign no blame, for it is an issue of cognition. The best way I can describe it is, intelligence is not a single factor. And it's not even a few factors. It's a massive bar graph, with 1000s upon 1000s of bars, each delineating a different aspect of intelligence.
A lucky few may score high on all those bars, yet even the most intelligent of us tend to score high on only some of those bars. And my point is, I've seen people immensely intelligent on some of those bars, yet astonishingly deficient on others.
We love to make fun of politicians, so I'll use one as an example here. Politicians tend to be incredibly personable, and very difficult to dislike in person. They exude congeniality, they read you like a book, and can often orate your wallet completely out of your pocket, and you'll thank them for it too. It's how they managed to go so far politically, yet some of these same politicians have severe and massive deficiencies in cognition.
Back to the pointed sticks, and the nutjobs who would wield them pre-tech, these people are simply as they are. Yet in the past, you'd see one nutjob in a community, and they'd be surrounded by normalcy, it would temper them, mitigate their effect, sand off their edges so to speak.
Yet as our communities grew in size and scope, these individuals could finally meet more of their ilk. A large city might have dozens of them, larger still cities hundreds, and they'd meet up. And as technology grew, and access to the printing press become possible for all, and for less and less cost, these same people could then send their madness in newsletter form to even those small communities where maybe only one nutjob existed.
But those people needed to still connect in some way. Maybe through an ad in the back of a magazine, or something akin yet far less gated by 'normals'.
Yet today? Now? Algorithms match you up with all those nutjobs. Where before you might live in isolation, and the friends you had might scoff at that weird idea you have, now you've found a community of hundreds, or thousands just like you! And they all affirm your madness, they pat you on the back, they congratulate you for seeing the light! They whisper all those sweet nothings into your ear, all those secret things you knew were true, and they listen to all you say on the subject.
For the first time in your life you have a home, a community, and before TikTok, or some weird forum, it would have never all been possible. You'd have been isolated, even in the age of magazines, and print, for you'd have never found one another.
And worse, now profit enters the system. Those who would steal, or thieve, or build bridges with sub-standard concrete for profit, or anything for money regardless of cost to us all, appear on this scene. They see those nutjobs, and they seek to profit from them. They own youtube, or tiktok channels, and often do not believe in anything but profit. They'll tell you anything you want to hear, espouse any crazy idea, and like that bridge built with substandard concrete, they'll take the money and run as society collapses around them.
This profit motive was always there, see cults. Yet the reach and scope was just not what it is today, there is so much more range given to a single person now.
People have had a mistrust in authority as far back as when nomadic tribes were the norm but somebody had to decide where to hunt or gather that day or to move on. Good luck changing human nature.
Chatty Kathy could only share her moonbat ideas with a couple people at a time. Now she has a TikTok and the ability to go viral. Even folks sharing her video to mock it are spreading her message.
> Literally measles is making a comeback due to idiots like RFK
The more likely explanation is the massive amounts of immigration from 3rd world countries. But yes, he’s not helping any.
Immigration has nothing to do with it.
Measles is highly infectious, you need a very high percentage of the population immune in order to maintain herd immunity. So long as you have herd immunity the only source of infection is travel--but note that this works both ways. It's much more likely to be Americans catching it while traveling than immigrants bringing it. They at least used to trace the original case in such outbreaks, it was normally someone who had been abroad.
We saw the same thing with Covid--quarantine against Chinese people, while ignoring Americans returning from the very same places even when they said they had symptoms. (And irrelevant besides, the strain from Europe quickly dominated.)
Sorry, can you explain how this relates to immigration?
Especially ironic given how hard a number of South American countries are having eliminating the MMR diseases due to import cases from Europe and the U.S.
Unlike the measles, HPV is not a good eradication candidate due to the existence of non-human reservoirs.
I think you said that backwards. HPV does not have non-human reservoirs, per Wikipedia. (Do you have evidence that it's wrong?)
Ah, looks like I might have read the paper wrong. It's theorized that some HPV strains could also be carried by non-human primates.
Hence the "H"
Although you are (as I understand) right, the question itself is valid, lots of diseases spread to species other than the one that is in the name… Chickenpox, monkeypox, swine flu, or even the Spanish flu.
Cervical cancer (uterus), not skin cancer from a bad papillomas as I thought after looking up what HPV meant
Also throat, mouth, tongue, anal and penile cancers.
It turns out a human body has a lot of surfaces facing the "outside" in some sense and we forget about the parts we can't see. Most of this surface is not covered in what we'd conventionally consider skin. It's bit like if you were looking at surfaces in a house and forgot the walls and ceiling.
Humans (and most animals) are just tubes with extra bits.
I remember arguing in favor of Gardasil as a teenager in highschool. And now RFK Jr calling it dangerous. Someday my head might just explode.
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There are people who will do the right thing, there will be people who you can teach to do the right thing, and there will be people who will ignore you no matter what. Optimize for the first two. "Pick better parents" is unfortunately unactionable advice.
Australia has almost eradicated cervical cancer through HPV vaccination efforts, other countries will get there as a function of uptake and cohort replacement. There is a recently developed blood test that can detect the biomarkers from HPV related cancers years before they would traditionally be diagnosed, but prevention via vaccination remains key.
https://www.who.int/news/item/17-11-2023-global-partners-che...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPV_vaccine
https://academic.oup.com/jnci/advance-article-abstract/doi/1... | https://doi.org/10.1093/jnci/djaf249
Shaming the current administration and pointing out their lies until we are out of breath is still a worthwhile endeavor. In this age of social media a good gotcha that goes viral can tank an election. With the midterms coming up in a year I’m hopeful.
I'm not a woman, but I wonder how necessary pap smears (one of the most invasive procedures to which women are routinely subjected) are if everyone's vaccinated against HPV? https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/cervical-cancer-screenin...
> I'm not a woman, but I wonder how necessary pap smears (one of them most invasive procedures to which women are subjected) are if everyone's vaccinated against HPV? https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/cervical-cancer-screenin...
It will continue to be necessary because there are more strains of HPV than those that are targeted by vaccines.
The way this article is broken into sections is a bit misleading - the recommendation for cervical cancer hasn't been annual screening for a long time. This is acknowledged in the text, but even there is unclear.
It looks like your sibling post has a link from WHO showing screening will be a continued effort.
key quote here
"Despite this good news, roughly one third of women screened during the study period still had infection with high-risk HPV types not covered by the original vaccines – and new infections with these types were more frequent among vaccinated women, compared to unvaccinated ones."
Not to mention the unavoidable side effects that every injection causes.
Is there a net positive benefit to this shot, other than to GAVI and the manufacturer's bottom line ? Nobody knows.
That's because other strains weren't covered by the original vaccines: Strains 16 and 18 were the high risk strains covered in the 2008 roll-out, the roll-out to young girls of the broader vaccine covering other high risk strains didn't start until 2017.
“In 2017, one of the first birth cohorts of women in Denmark who were HPV-vaccinated as teenage girls in 2008 reached the screening age of 23 years,” Nonboe explained."
It will take several more years to see the effects on other strains. It seems to have been wildly successful so far.
[delayed]
1. There's still overall fewer infections from high risk HPV types in these women.
2. It needs to be confirmed in ~10 years, but it seems very likely that women given the shots that protect against all high risk HPV types will see almost no infections from them.
> Is there a net positive benefit to this shot?
Yes
https://ourworldindata.org/hpv-vaccination-world-can-elimina...
Doesn't answer the question. Other vaccines, for example DTP, have been shown to cause higher long term mortality rate over those who didn't get it.
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/2/3/e000707
That study is small, observation based and controversial, and the researchers have data from a randomized follow up study that they have been keeping secret for the last 14 years. The coverage of the controversy has mostly been in Danish media, despite these hacks advising the current US administration. See https://www.sensible-med.com/p/the-false-narrative-of-nonspe... for a writeup in English.
Not my field but just looking at that I see variations as big as the signal they are supposedly detecting. Looks an awful lot like noise.
And note that it's possible for a vaccine to have a negative survival benefit yet be a good idea--in a population with herd immunity a vaccine provides little benefit to those who receive it so long as enough people receive it to provide the herd immunity. But if too many don't get it the risk from not getting it goes up considerably. Look at what has been happening with measles--measles was basically unheard of, the quacks said not to vaccinate (remember, Wakefield was attacking a specific vaccine that he stood to profit from the controversy, Worm Brain doesn't believe in infectious disease in the first place), now we have people dying of measles.
> Other vaccines, for example DTP, have been shown to cause higher long term mortality rate
Sure. This one hasn’t.
That said, I frankly think people should be free to vaccinate as they please, and cities, states and private businesses free to include and exclude folks based on vaccination status as they please. (I’m also in favor of letting insurance companies choose if they want to cover diseases someone chose to get by going unvaccinated.)
Agreed. We could decide it over Facebook. Who is allowed to buy food etc.
That would be democratic and efficient.
> Sure. This one hasn’t.
That is exactly why we need to apply the precautionary principle for new drugs like this one.
> That said, I frankly think people should be free to vaccinate as they please
Never said they shouldn't be. Just need to be skeptical of organizations like GAVI and their PR, as they have a huge conflict of interest in promoting and profiting from these drugs.