Human Papilloma Virus

Cancer cases and cancer deaths are dropping in many corners of the United States, according to statistics released Wednesday by the American Cancer Society. Since 1999, cancer death rates have declined in both men and women and among all racial and ethnic groups with the exception of American Indians and Alaskan Natives. But cancer rates have stabilized in those two groups. The biggest drops in death rates were seen among African American and Latino men, with declines of 2.4% and 2.3% per year, respectively.

An experimental vaccine against one strain of the human papilloma virus blocked most infections and, more important, prevented development of a precursor to cervical cancer, researchers said Monday. The results are an important step toward the eradication of cervical cancer, which strikes about 15,000 women in the U.S. annually, killing a third of them. Globally, the disease strikes half a million women every year and kills 60% of them.

Latinas contract cervical cancer almost twice as often as other women, indicating that not enough of them are having Pap tests, federal officials said Wednesday. The study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also found that older women of all ethnic groups were more likely to show advanced cases of the disease when first diagnosed. These women sometimes lack easy access to screening tests because of their age, low education, low income or lack of health insurance, the CDC's Dr.

Cervical cancer is the second most common cancer among women worldwide, trailing only tumors of the breast. But if a growing coalition of researchers has its way, the insidious disease should fall out of the top 10 within the next two decades and could eventually drop completely off physicians' radar screens. Every year, cervical cancer strikes nearly half a million women around the world; about 200,000 women a year die of the disease.

New data on the controversial HPV vaccine designed to prevent cervical cancer have raised serious questions about its efficacy, researchers reported today, potentially undercutting the efforts in many states to make vaccination mandatory. Although the vaccine, called Gardasil, blocked about 100% of infections by the two human papilloma virus strains it targets, it reduced the incidence of cancer precursors by only 17% overall.

Robin Sealander was relieved with the results of her Pap smear. For several months in late 1985, the 26-year-old Baldwin Park woman had suffered from heavy vaginal bleeding and irregular menstrual periods. She went to her gynecologist fearing that she had cancer. The doctor took a Pap smear, a test used to detect cervical cancer. It came back negative, as had two previous tests. Nevertheless, Sealander's symptoms didn't go away.

An experimental vaccine against cervical cancer has cleared its final clinical hurdle, showing in a large trial of more than 12,000 women that it is 100% effective in blocking the major forms of the disease, its manufacturer said Thursday. Merck Inc. said it would seek Food and Drug Administration approval for the vaccine, called Gardasil, this year and could begin marketing it next year. The vaccine immunizes against human papilloma virus, or HPV, the primary cause of cervical cancer.

George Warren didn't mind getting his 9-year-old daughter vaccinated against chickenpox. He didn't object to any of the 10 or so inoculations that California requires. But a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer and genital warts? For a preteen girl? "She's not gonna need it," said Warren, a 30-year-old land surveyor from Rescue, Calif., about 28 miles from Sacramento. "I'm a good parent. I tell her what's right and wrong."

Advertisements can be very persuasive -- whether they're promoting a snack food, a toy or even a medical test. If you've watched much television lately, you may have seen a commercial touting the benefits of a relatively new screening test for cervical cancer. Its message is unambiguous: "A Pap test isn't enough." The advertisement encourages women to get tested for human papillomavirus (HPV), the virus known to cause cervical cancer.

My patient, an outgoing young woman, didn't consider herself promiscuous. She'd had only two sexual partners -- her current boyfriend and one in high school several years earlier. She and her partner had been monogamous for more than a year, she said, and they were eager to give up the inconvenience of their not-always-consistent use of condoms for a birth control pill. I reminded her that she would no longer be as protected against sexually transmitted diseases as she had been with a condom.