Should Your Daughter Receive the HPV Vaccine?

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Cervical cancer is the world's second–deadliest cancer for women, but only because women in developing countries don't have easy access to regular Pap tests. Eighty–three percent of the world's new cases and 85 percent of cervical–cancer deaths occur in developing countries.

The Journal of the American Medical Association reports that among U.S. women aged 14 to 24, the combined rate of infection for ALL 37 types of sexually transmitted HPV is 33.8 percent – but the rate of infection for HPV 16 and 18 -- the two types of cancer-causing HPV against which Gardasil and  Cervarix  protect -- are astronomically lower: only 1.5 percent and 0.8 percent, respectively. So even if every U.S. woman between 14 and 24 were vaccinated with Gardasil before being exposed to HPV, the vaccine would only protect 2.3 percent of all U.S. women or around 1 percent of the U.S. population.

Most HPV infections, including the carcinogenic ones, resolve themselves without treatment. The American Cancer Society’s HPV guidelines for physicians explain that approximately 75 percent of all types of HPV infections in adults and 90 percent of those in adolescents disappear on their own. (In my early 40s, I had an HPV infection that turned precancerous, but over a two-year period the infection resolved itself without any treatment whatsoever.)

See my Arguments 1 and 2.