The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is now recommending that boys and young men be vaccinated against human papillomavirus, or HPV, to protect against anal and throat cancers that can result from sexual activity.
The committee recommended that boys ages 11 and 12 and males ages 13 through 21 who had not already had all three shots, be vaccinated. Men between the ages of 22 and 26, who had not been vaccinated, should have the shots, also. We’ve already heard that girls and women between the ages of 11 and 26 should be vaccinated, also. Many teens have not been vaccinated due to the controversy surrounding it. It is also very new and many parents are unsure about having their daughters get the shot without knowing the longterm safety of the vaccine.
The CDC is very vocal about how necessary this vaccine is: “This is cancer, for Pete’s sake,” said Dr. William Schaffner, chairman of the department of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and a nonvoting member of the committee. “A vaccine against cancer was the dream of our youth.”
HPV infection is the most common sexually transmitted disease – between 75 percent and 80 percent of females and males in the United States will be infected at some point in their lives. Most will overcome the infection with no ill effects. But in some people, infections lead to cellular changes that cause warts or cancer, including cervical, vaginal and vulvar cancers in women and anal cancers in men and women. A growing body of evidence suggests that HPV also causes throat cancers in men and women as a result of oral sex.
The vaccine costs quite a bit and that is the reason many people are not having this specific vaccination done. The CDC says that vaccinating homosexual boys would be far more cost effective than vaccinating all boys, since the burden of disease is far higher in homosexuals. Realistically, how many boys between 11 & 17 are out and admitting to their sexual preference? “The bottom line is that not all kids start having sex when they’re 13. Mine didn’t, I promise you,” Dr. Sandra Adamson Fryhofer, a clinical associate professor of medicine at Emory University School of Medicine and a committee member, said to laughter from the audience.
Where does that leave us, the parents of boys? Sure, we don’t want to think our boys are having sex as young as 11 or 13-years-old, but we don’t want them to catch a virus if they are having sex. In our home, we don’t vaccinate on a normal schedule and I rarely choose to have my children vaccinated with new vaccines. When there are no long term studies, it is hard to give my kids the shot and make them guinea pigs. I think this will be one of those vaccines to think about for a while before I allow my children to have it.
What do you think: Will you have your girls or boys vaccinated for HPV? Do you think it is safe?
