We have a vaccine against the virus that causes cervical cancer. It’s as safe as any other vaccine, and getting it for your tween son or daughter—or yourself, if you’re in your early twenties—is a no-brainer. Don’t buy into bogus exposés on “dangers” that don’t really exist.
HPV, the human papillomavirus, comes in many different types, some of which cause cancers of the cervix, throat, and other body parts. Some cause genital warts. The vaccine protects against up to nine types of the virus.
But the HPV vaccine has an image problem, and it’s multifaceted. There are the false claims that it causes serious health problems in girls who get the shot. There’s also a myth that the vaccine encourages kids to have sex. Doctors have become shy about even talking about the vaccine, reporting that they expect conversations with parents to be uncomfortable. As a result, less than half of teenagers get all three doses of the vaccine—a vaccine with no serious safety issues, that prevents cancer.
Why the HPV Vaccine Is Important
Human Papillomaviruses cause several cancers, including the cervical cancer that kills 4,000 women each year. They also cause cancers of the anus, penis, and throat in both men and women, and some types cause genital warts instead of cancer. Where most viruses replicate by turning cells into virus factories and then killing them, HPV makes more of itself by causing cells to divide. If the immune system doesn’t put a stop to this process, the result is a wart or a tumor. (A related virus causes rabbits to grow horns. Nature is weird.)
Most people get the HPV virus, even if they don’t develop cancer: 80% of 50-year-old women have had it at some point in their life. (It’s likely just as common in men.) The virus is a lazy one, taking years to progress from infection to cancer. Most of the time, the immune system kills the virus within a year or two, and no harm is done.
But if the virus lingers, it can cause cancer decades later. That’s why screening is so important. One way is with a pap smear to look for abnormal cells, caused by the virus, on a woman’s cervix. (The cervix is the place where the uterus and vagina meet.) Cancer or pre-cancerous changes are treatable if caught early. Because the virus reproduces so slowly, it’s sufficient to screen every 3 to 5 years with a combination Pap smear and HPV test.
If a woman keeps up with screening, she’s very unlikely to end up with a cancer that could kill her. But not everybody gets screened as often as they should, and there’s no screening for the other cancers HPV can cause, including those in men. That’s why a vaccine makes so much sense. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends the vaccine for boys and girls starting around age 11.
The HPV Vaccine Doesn’t Encourage Kids to Have Sex
This is a vaccine against a sexually transmitted disease, and the vaccine is recommended for children. From a medical standpoint, that makes sense: you get the vaccine before you’re exposed to the virus. If you waited until you were, say, 17 (the average age at which people first have sex), it might be too late.
Any connection between kids and sex makes a lot of parents nervous. But HPV vaccination doesn’t make 11-year-olds think “great, I’ll go have sex now!” any more than the Hepatitis B vaccine, given at birth, makes newborns go out and inject drugs with shared needles. A 2012 study in Pediatrics confirmed that girls who got the HPV shot were no more likely to have sex than their peers that got other vaccines.
Still, parents don’t like to think about their kids having sex. In another study published in Pediatrics, 17% of parents who refused the HPV vaccine said their kid didn’t need it. But half of teens have had sex by age 17, 16% by age 15, and 2% by age 12. Those numbers come from a survey that also had the awful finding that 11% of first sexual encounters were “unwanted.”
I’m not expecting you to stand in the doctor’s office thinking about how likely your son or daughter is to be raped, and whether that’s going to affect their chance of getting cancer in middle age. All I’m saying is that the HPV vaccine should be a routine thing, like the meningitis and tetanus/diphtheria/pertussis vaccines they get around the same age. If your doctor doesn’t offer, step up and ask for it.
Side Effect Controversies are Drummed Up for Eyeballs, Not Based in Science
The latest boneheaded grab for ratings comes from Ireland’s TV3, which aired a special this week about girls with health problems that, they and their families say, occurred after receiving the HPV vaccine. This type of story sensationalizes rare cases that may not even have anything to do with the vaccine, while ignoring a huge body of research on the shot’s safety.
The special was done in partnership with an Irish group that calls itself “Reactions and Effects of Gardasil Resulting in Extreme Trauma”—that’s right, R.E.G.R.E.T. Their “testimonies of regret” page is filled with heartbreaking stories: teenagers with mysterious symptoms, often including seizures and fatigue, visiting doctors and alternative medicine specialists who can’t offer lasting solutions. There are similar groups in the US publicizing the stories of young women who fell ill after getting the shot.
But this isn’t proof of a problem. With these stories, you can play the logical fallacies infographic
If a vaccine truly does cause problems, observations like this would be one of the first clues that something was wrong, but it would take studies on many people to show if there really is a connection. That’s why the US government maintains the VAERS database, where anyone can register an “adverse event”—basically, any bad thing—that happens after vaccination. Anti-vaxxers often point to VAERS as proof that vaccines are dangerous, but that’s not what the reports mean. From a FAQ on the VAERS website:
Just because an adverse event happened after a person received a vaccine does not mean the vaccine caused the adverse event. Other factors, such as the person’s medical history and other medicines the person took near the time of the vaccination, may have caused the adverse event. It is important to remember that many adverse events reported to VAERS may not be caused by vaccines.
Sensationalizing anecdotes like this is part of a pattern. Earlier this year, the Toronto Star published a similarly misguided “investigation” of the vaccine. Julia Belluz at Vox called them out, and they retracted the story. In 2013, Katie Couric dedicated an episode of her show to the same issue. Couric later admitted that the show spent too much time stoking fears and not enough time communicating that the benefits of the shot clearly outweigh its risks.
The Risk Science Center at the University of Michigan has a handy video explaining that calculation:
We know the risks are very low because they’ve been well studied. An analysis was published recently in the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal covering 15 studies over, in total, more than a million people. Serious adverse events like autoimmune diseases, blood clots, and stroke were no more common in vaccinated people than in those who did not get the vaccine. The side effects that were more common in vaccinated people are minor ones that can happen with any vaccine: fainting, for example, and skin reactions at the site of the shot. (Teenagers sometimes faint after receiving shots, and we don’t fully understand why.)
Nothing in life is ever guaranteed “safe,” but vaccines come close. The risks are very small, and the benefits clearly outweigh them for almost everyone. The usual “talk to your doctor” advice applies—if you’re pregnant or if you’re allergic to some part of the vaccine, for example, it might not be appropriate for you.
Look, data and studies are important and worth your trust, but it can be hard when we’re talking about your son or daughter. Just know that the overwhelming majority of the data, accumulated over decades, says this is safe and that it prevents cancers that we know are fatal later in life. You can’t give your daughter or son a better gift than that.
Illustration by Tara Jacoby.
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