The Oral Cancer Foundation released this video last month, just a couple of weeks before the FDA was scheduled to vote on approval of the ‘male’ Gardasil vaccine.
Whether you’re pro- or anti-vaccine, you might wonder why has FDA testing of and approval for Gardasil’s use on males lagged three years behind the female-only “cervical cancer” vaccine? Most of us who have followed Gardasil’s development were not surprised when the FDA recently voted to approve its use on boys and young men for the prevention of genital warts. However, this limited focus on male genital warts ignores the growing number of medical studies which have shown causal connections between two cervical-cancer causing types of HPV (covered by Gardasil) and a variety of cancers that can have devastating health consequences in female and male bodies.
In light of this body of research, many were dismayed by the fact that the CDC decided against recommending routine use of the Gardasil vaccine for boys. A NYT article reported that this committee will likely consider data on Gardasil’s ability to protect against male cancers when it meets again in February.
As more Americans learn about the causal links between HPV strains covered by Gardasil and serious (sometimes fatal) oral and anogenital cancers, it will be interesting to see if U.S. boys/young men get vaccinated at as high a rate as girls/young women.
To educate people about the risk of oral cancer from sexually-transmitted HPV, the Oral Cancer Foundation released this video:
———————————————
Adina Nack is an associate professor of Sociology at California Lutheran University specializing in medical sociology, gender inequality and sexual health. Nack’s book, Damaged Goods? Women Living with Incurable Sexually Transmitted Diseases came out in 2008. You can see an earlier post of hers, about sexually transmitted disease and stigma, here.
If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.
Comments 3
Craig — November 10, 2009
I probably have an institutional bias, as I work in public health, but I look back on all the trouble and controversy Gardasil has faced, and I find it difficult to argue--or at least, argue very strenuously--with the strategies that FDA, CDC or Merck have pursued in making that vaccine part of the health care landscape in this country.
Public health is about identifying the largest impacts our oh-too-limited resources can have. With respect to HPV, male genital warts and various cancers are of course a real concern, but a concern that is really quite small next to that of cervical cancer in women--11,000 diagnoses and nearly 4,000 deaths annually in the United States.
Sometimes a picture really does convey a thousand words, and I would encourage a glance at a handy chart in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cases_of_HPV_cancers_graph.png
(The red part of of the bars shows cancers attributed to HPV infection.)
Again, resources being what they are, the approval process being as long and expensive as it is, the risk to women being so much greater than that to men, and, alas, the social factors around adoption being what they have been, I think everyone involved has done a pretty good job of setting priorities and deploying this product in a way that does the most good.
There are many things to regret about the process of approving, recommending, and normalizing vaccines in this country--from the anti-science attitudes that get so much play to the vile notion that fear of cervical cancer is a useful deterrent to promiscuity. But, as I say, public health practitioners have to operate in the landscape as it is, not the landscape as it ought to be. I think they've done a good job.
mr_snow — November 10, 2009
If you are worried about vaccine safety or just interested in the vaccine debate, Amy Wallace at Wired magazine has a great article on the vaccine debate and the dangers of not getting vaccinated to the general public:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_waronscience