The NewsHour on PBS aired a segment tonight, "New Study Stirs Debate over Mandatory Cervical Cancer Vaccination." The NewsHour health correspondent, Susan Dentzer addresses a new study of HPV infection rates, the HPV vaccine, and debate over making the vaccine mandatory. A transcript is available, as are audio versions via RealAudio and mp3 download.
The study mentioned above, released today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, reports that 1/3 of American women are infected with HPV by the age of 24, according to this article in the Washington Post. JAMA is providing the full-text of the article, "Prevalence of HPV Infection Among Females in the United States," for free on its website. According to the report, prevalence of HPV infection among women ages 14-19 was 24.5%. Interestingly, the two most frequently detected types of HPV were not those the Gardasil vaccine protects against, but were considered low-risk forms of the virus. There were no statistically significant differences in rates of each type of HPV found except for the greater frequency of those two low-risk forms. According to the study, "Overall, HPV types 6, 11, 16, or 18 were detected in 3.4% of the study participants, corresponding with 3.1 million females with prevalent infection with HPV types included in the quadrivalent HPV vaccine. Few participants (0.10%) had both HPV types 16 and 18 and none had all 4 HPV vaccine types. At least 1 of these 4 HPV types was detected in 6.2% (95% CI, 3.8%-10.3%) of females aged 14 to 19 years."
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