ScienceDaily (Feb. 5, 2011) — The vaccine for human papillomavirus (HPV) can prevent 90 percent of genital warts in men when offered before exposure to the four HPV strains covered by the vaccine, according to a new multi-center study led by H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and UCSF.
The four-year, international clinical trial, which also found a nearly 66 percent effectiveness in the general population of young men regardless of prior exposure to these strains, provides the first reported results of using the HPV vaccine as a prophylactic in men.
Initial data from this study informed the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to approve the vaccine for boys in 2009 to prevent warts, while results from a substudy led the FDA to expand approval late last year to prevent anal cancer. Findings can be found in the Feb. 3 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.
While the HPV vaccine was approved in 2006 for girls to prevent cervical cancer, the vaccine’s benefit for young men was not initially addressed.
[Note from SaneVax: It’s too bad the headline and the information in the article don’t exactly match. The SaneVax Team finds an efficacy rating of 66% hardly enough to justify mass vaccination campaigns. Leaving 34% of the vaccinated population unprotected while running the risks involved in taking any medication is not an acceptable trade-off when you are talking about injecting a previously healthy population.
One needs to remember that no pre-screening for exposure to vaccine-relevant HPV is recommended for use in conjunction with vaccination. Therefore, the quoted 90% efficacy figure is completely irrelevant.]
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