HPV vaccine for boys too

Submitted by shelbydburns Tue 03/08/2011

For mothers of boys this is interesting: the HPV vaccine may work for your offspring too. In fact the vaccine can prevent 90 percent of genital warts in men when taken before exposure to the four HPV strains attacked by the vaccine. This is according to a study led by H. Lee Moffitt Cancer center and University of California – San Francisco.

The four year study not only discovered that but also that the effectiveness of the vaccine in the general population, meaning those men who had been exposed to one or more of the viruses, was 66 percent.

While the FDA approved the vaccine for the prevention of cervical cancer for girls in 2009, the effectiveness for boys was not known. Genital warts are one of the leading sexually transmitted diseases. The CDC estimates that half of all sexually active Americans will get HPV at some point in their lives.

“This is an exciting development in the STD world,” said Joel Palefsky, MD, a UCSF professor of medicine who le-led the research. “It shows that if we vaccinate males early enough, we should be able to prevent most cases of external genital warts in this population.”

Vaccinating boys should also help with diminishing the transmission to women and reduce the incidence of the virus in the population overall. It’s something to talk about with your doctor or pediatrician.

Source: UCSF, ScienceDaily

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