Men also carry the human papillomavirus, the virus that can lead to male cancers and genital warts. And they could spread HPV to their sexual partners, putting those people at risk for cervical cancer.
So the HPV vaccine, that is often recommended for girls, should extend to boys as well, say researchers from Innsbruck Medical University in Austria. Their study was presented at the meeting of the American Urological Association on Tuesday.
The HPV vaccine is recommended for women age 26 or younger, to prevent genital warts and to reduce risk of cervical cancer. The FDA approved the first HPV vaccine, Gardasil, back in 2006.
Although the vaccine has been approved for males since 2009, it hasn’t been as heavily promoted for them. The vaccine could help men prevent genital warts as well as penile and anal cancers.
In the study, Dr. Michael Ladurner Rennau and his colleagues tested 133 men, between 7 months to 82 years old for the presence of HPV, one of the most common sexually transmitted infections. They used DNA extraction. They found 18.8% of the examined foreskins had the low-risk HPV genotypes and 9.77% had the high-risk HPV.
None of the patients had clinical symptoms of HPV.
[Note from SaneVax: Let’s see if we have this right – based on a ‘study’ of 133 men where 25 were found with low risk HPV, 13 were found with high risk HPV and none with any clinical symptoms, the American Urological Association is comfortable recommending boys and young men be vaccinated against HPV. The SaneVax Team wonders how one can make such a sweeping recommendation upon the discovery of 13 cases of high risk HPV when the vast majority of these infections will clear on their own with no clinical symptoms.]
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