Hpv

A reinvigorated Michele Bachmann continued her assault on Rick Perry on Tuesday morning, accusing the Texas governor and rival GOP presidential candidate of “crony capitalism” in connection with his state's program requiring the vaccination of young girls against human papillomavirus. She had some help from Sarah Palin, who told Fox News that she supported Bachmann's efforts Bachmann's criticism of Perry on Monday night at the CNN/Tea Party Express GOP presidential debate provided one of the debate's true fiery moments.

Parents forgo vaccines for their teenage kids for a number of reasons, researchers said Monday in a paper reporting findings from the annual National Immunization Survey of Teens, which was published in the journal Pediatrics.  That might mean that public health agencies need to try new things to get immunizations on target to prevent spread of the human papilloma virus, the cause of cervical and other cancers. Overall, immunization rates among teenagers are on the way up, the Pediatrics study noted.

This year's Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer, released online Monday, brought Americans good news and bad.  Extending a trend since the early 1990s, authors reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute that cancer deaths have continued to fall in the United States, with rates declining 1.5% per year for all cancers, in both sexes combined, from 2000 to 2009.  Deaths from the most common cancers - including lung,...

Researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control said Tuesday that vaccination coverage levels in U.S. adults were “unacceptably low,” and that public health workers need to do more to make sure adults got immunizations to protect them from diseases including whooping cough, shingles and pneumonia. The team, writing in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report , updated statistics on vaccine coverage for  those diseases as well as cervical cancer, hepatitis A and B and other preventable illnesses.  There were “modest gains” in coverage for the Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis)

A Food and Drug Administration advisory committee Wednesday recommended that the agency extend approval of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine Gardasil for protection against anal cancer in males and females ages 9 through 26. The agency is not required to follow the recommendations of its advisory committees, but it generally does so. Anal cancer is relatively uncommon, striking about 5,000 Americans each year. About 90% of cases are thought to be caused by HPV. Gardasil protects against four of the most common strains of HPV. It is already licensed for protection against cervical cancer in women and against genital warts in both sexes ages 9 to 26. The new indication was based primarily on a clinical trial conducted among 4,065 men, 602 of them gay. Patients were randomly assigned to receive either three doses of the vaccine or a placebo.

You've just gotten the diagnosis: You have genital warts. But what does this mean? Human papillomavirus, or HPV, is the virus that causes genital warts. Genital HPV is usually spread from person to person during sexual activity. But there are other facts you should know about HPV: Certain strains of HPV can increase a woman's risk of contracting cancer of the cervix. The virus does cause genital warts, but, even if you have no warts, you can still have the virus. And you can still give HPV to your partner during sex. It's hard to know when you became infected because you can have the virus for years without any signs or symptoms.

People who have lung cancer are more likely to have antibodies to a high-risk form of human papilloma virus, according to research presented Monday. Certain strains of human papilloma virus -- or HPV -- can cause cervical cancer. Researchers from France ran tests on 1,633 lung cancer patients and 2,729 healthy people and found a low rate of antibodies to high-risk HPV strains in the people without lung cancer -- less than 5% of participants. But the incidence was significantly higher in people with lung cancer, and those rates did not differ based on whether they were current smokers, former smokers or had never smoked.

A monogamous 45-year old woman, I had been warned for several months about steam rooms by my friend, who had been battling HPV since she--a monogamous 44-year old--got it from the steam room at her gym. Now, a year later, having had nearly a dozen treatments (still not finished) to rid myself and my husband of the virus, let me cry loud and clear: Beware wet heat! HPV thrives in it! NAME WITHHELD Venice

Vaccines aren't just for kids, but far too few grown-ups are rolling up their sleeves, disappointed federal health officials reported Wednesday. The numbers of the newly vaccinated are surprisingly low, considering how much public attention a trio of new shots -- which protect against shingles, whooping cough and cervical cancer -- have received. Yet many people seem to have missed, or forgotten, the news: A survey by the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases found that aside from the flu, most adults have trouble naming diseases that they could prevent with a simple inoculation.

Re "1 in 4 teens got cervical cancer vaccine in '07," Feb. 18 Gardasil, the cervical cancer vaccine, has been widely accepted in California, but it is not 100% effective. Most cervical cancers are caused by a very common sexually transmitted infection -- the human papillomavirus (HPV). There are more than a dozen high-risk strains of HPV capable of causing cervical cancer, but the vaccine only protects against four strains of HPV, two of which are known to cause 70% of cervical cancer cases.

This year's Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer, released online Monday, brought Americans good news and bad.  Extending a trend since the early 1990s, authors reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute that cancer deaths have continued to fall in the United States, with rates declining 1.5% per year for all cancers, in both sexes combined, from 2000 to 2009.  Deaths from the most common cancers - including lung,...

Wow. Can you believe it? Tetanus vaccinations do not make children likelier to walk barefoot on rusty nails. Masturbation does not cause blindness or hairy palms. And girls who get the HPV vaccination to protect against the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, the cause of 70% of cervical cancer, do not turn slutty because of it. For this we actually had a study -- a sober, clinical response to the notional premise afoot in segments of American politics and culture that the vaccine, which can give young girls a lifetime's protection from cervical cancer, loosens their morals.

A shot that would make girls more inclined to have sex. When the HPV vaccine came on the scene, there were some who had that fear: This shot will reduce worries about a harmful sexually transmitted infection -- and reduce girls' inhibitions as well. And girls could mistakenly believe it's a magic bullet against pregnancy and other sexually transmitted diseases too. A new study kicks those fears to the curb. Researchers looked at girls who'd had an HPV vaccine and tracked the appointments they made and the advice they sought regarding sexual health over the next three years.

A large study of the safety of the HPV vaccine has turned up no unexpected side effects. The study, published Monday in the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, did find that the vaccine caused some women to faint the day they received it, and some recipients also developed skin infections. Both problems are believed to be general side effects of vaccines, and unrelated to anything specific about the HPV shot. HPV, or human papillomavirus, is the most common sexually transmitted disease among American women.

States that require vaccination for pertussis, meningitis and tetanus for admission to middle school have a higher vaccination rate than states that do not, but the rate is not nearly as high as one might expect from such a requirement, researchers reported Monday. States that required only that educational materials be sent home for those vaccines and the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine showed no improvement in vaccination rates. Vaccines for tetanus and pertussis are typically given during childhood, but the effects can diminish over time and a booster shot is recommended in early adolescence.

For generations of women, it's been an ingrained medical ritual: Get a Pap test every year. Now two influential groups of medical experts say that having cervical cancer screening once a year is not necessary and, in fact, should be discouraged. Many women can wait as long as five years between screenings, the new guidelines say. The call for screening cutbacks, released Wednesday, is based on evolving knowledge accrued over the last decade about human papillomavirus, a common sexually transmitted disease that causes most cervical cancer, and the availability of an HPV test that shows whether a woman has been infected with the most common variants of the virus.

Re "Abstinence-Only: Breeding Ignorance," Commentary, Dec. 7: What abstinence education programs promote is the truth: the fact that abstinence is the only 100% effective method for preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. At a time when more than 10,000 teens every day are contracting a sexually transmitted disease, shouldn't we be helping our teens avoid STDs altogether? Take, for example, the most common sexually transmitted disease in America -- human papilloma virus.

HPV infects the mouths of an estimated 7% of men and women from the ages of 14 to 69 in the U.S. -- and men have it at higher rates than women, according to a study out last week in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. Just 3.6% of women studied for the paper had oral HPV, while 10.1% of men did. It's unclear why there's such a difference in infection rates, but it may have to do with oral sex practices, experts say. (The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provides some information specifically related to HPV and men .)

A new study showing an estimated 7% of American teens and adults carry the human papillomavirus in their mouths may help health experts finally understand why rates of mouth and throat cancer have been climbing for nearly 25 years. The evidence makes it clear that oral sex practices play a key role in transmission. The new data, published online Thursday by the Journal of the American Medical Assn., are the first to assess the prevalence of oral HPV infection in the U.S. population.