This week a federal advisory panel recommended that boys, too, should get the HPV vaccine-the only existing vaccine that protects against cancer. Until now, the vaccine had only been recommended for girls to prevent cervical cancer, although both boys and girls are susceptible to infection by the human papilloma virus. The new recommendation for boys comes for two main reasons. First, there’s been a rise in throat and anal cancers attributed to HPV, in both men and women. There are now more throat cancers because of HPV and oral sex than because of smoking. Second, if men aren’t infected, unvaccinated women are safer.
Here’s the catch: because HPV is transmitted through sexual contact, some people oppose its use, as if vaccinating children against cancer will send them hopping into the sack with whomever shows up-while not vaccinating will keep them virgins until they marry another virgin. (Umm, possibly not.) I suspect this fear of sex will work especially against vaccinating boys, because parents will think of this as a vaccine for gay boys, and therefore, not for theirs. But heterosexual couplings can and do also involve oral and anal sex. As the New York times reports:
HPV infections cause about 15,000 cancers in women and 7,000 cancers in men each year. And while cervical cancer rates have plunged over the past four decades because of widespread screening, anal cancer rates in men and women have been increasing. Head and neck cancers have also been increasing, with the share associated with HPV infection increasing rapidly – perhaps because oral sex has increased in popularity.
Second, folks in this country are, frankly, weird about vaccinations-believing that nature is more likely than medicine to keep us alive. (Snort.) And so a lot of children will grow up to get potentially deadly cancers that could have been avoided.