Protect children against cancer with HPV vaccine

There are so many worries that come with adulthood. For our kids, HPV doesn’t have to be among them.

A recently published Philadelphia Inquirer article explored the reasons that the HPV vaccine remains a hard sell to many parents, despite its track record of “warding off infections that cause cancer and other malignancies.”

Merck’s Gardasil, which guards against HPV, was previously approved for adolescents and young adults up to age 26, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently said the shots now can be given to men and women up to age 45, the Inquirer reported.

The human papillomavirus is sexually transmitted. And as the Inquirer reported, genital strains of that virus “are so ubiquitous that almost all sexually active people — not just promiscuous ones — will be infected at some point.”

Nearly 80 million people — about one in four adults — now are infected with HPV in the U.S.

Professor Amy Leader has some advice for parents weighing whether to have their children vaccinated against HPV: Get the vaccine. “Don’t think about preventing a sexually transmitted disease now. Think about preventing cancer in 20 or 30 years.”

We need to start thinking of the HPV vaccine as an anti-cancer vaccine, says Leader, a researcher at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson Health and an associate professor in the division of population science, department of medical oncology, at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.

Why wouldn’t you want to spare your child from developing a preventable cancer in adulthood?

Unfortunately, Leader says, the anti-vaccine movement has “done a very good job of promulgating misinformation about vaccines.”

Sadly, we know this to be true. We’ve been railing against the movement for years because of the harm it’s done in scaring parents away from immunizations that can protect children from serious and sometimes deadly illnesses.

As Leader notes, anti-vaccine messages, often disseminated on social media, tend to be narrative-based. “Look what happened to poor Susie ... poor Susie.”

The public health community, on the other hand, speaks in data rather than narrative, preferring hard scientific facts to anecdote. The result?

“We get tuned out,” Leader says.

We implore our readers to tune in, to consider these facts, reported by the Inquirer:

— While it’s true that most HPV infections are eliminated by the immune system, highrisk strains “can persist and initiate cancer of the cervix, vagina, anus, vulva, penis, mouth and throat.”

— “Worldwide, that translates to more than 600,000 cancers a year — nearly 5 percent of all cancers.”

— The current version of the HPV vaccine, Gardasil 9, protects against seven high-risk types of the virus “that cause 90 percent of cervical cancers, as well as the two wart types.”

— Precancerous lesions caused by HPV “can progress to cancer and oral infections — the kind that have fueled an explosion in head and neck cancers in recent decades, particularly in men.”

The HPV vaccine is not a one-shot-and-done deal. Kids 11 or 12 should get “two shots of HPV vaccine six to twelve months apart,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Adolescents who receive their two shots less than five months apart will require a third dose of HPV vaccine.”

Is that inconvenient? Yes. But it’s not nearly as taxing as cancer.

Even if we start thinking, as we should, of the HPV vaccine as the anti-cancer vaccine it is, some parents still may worry about its associations with sex.

The reason it’s given to adolescents as young as 11 is not to encourage them to have sex, but because the vaccine is best administered while their immune response is at its best and before they are exposed to HPV.

The HPV vaccine should be viewed as insurance for the future, a way to protect your kids when they make the decision — hopefully years down the road — to have sex.

And when we say kids, we mean boys as well as girls.

“Every year in the United States, HPV causes 33,700 cancers in men and women,” the CDC states. “HPV vaccination can prevent most of the cancers (about 31,200) from ever developing.”

This anti-cancer vaccine is a gift that more of us should be giving our children. It’s a gift we wish had been available to us.

There are so many worries that come with adulthood. For our kids, vaccine-preventable HPV doesn’t have to be among them.