Human papillomavirus, or HPV, is the most common STD out there — a fact made even more aggravating by the absence of a good test for it. Sure, Pap testing can detect cellular abnormalities triggered by HPV, and the HPV DNA test can find evidence of infection. But it’s not a definitive test — a negative Pap/HPV DNA co-test doesn’t rule out the possibility that you carry the virus. Ditto for the anal Pap test — which most people haven’t even heard of anyway!
There are more compelling reasons to vaccinate boys against HPV — and not-as-compelling reasons to think Gardasil could protect against skin cancer.
The lack of a good diagnostic test makes the HPV vaccine an even more valuable asset. If we can drive the virus to extinction through aggressive vaccination campaigns, our limited diagnostic abilities become a moot point. And recent headlines have given us reasons to love the HPV vaccine even more.
HPV and Men
Many people think of HPV as a women’s issue, as the virus causes cervical cancer, and for a long time, boys and men weren’t even targeted for vaccination. But HPV is everyone’s issue — genital warts don’t care what gender you are, and cancer-causing strains of HPV cause most cases of anal cancer, penile cancer, and oropharyngeal cancer. Recently, a large, first-of-its kind study published in JAMA Oncology analyzed penile swabs provided by 1,757 men to figure out how common HPV is in this population. (While there is no FDA-approved test for diagnosing male patients with HPV, scientists can still collect swabs for research purposes.)
The results: 45.2 percent of American men ages 18 to 59 carry genital HPV — for a total of nearly 35 million adult males. HPV carriers can transmit the virus to sexual partners through vaginal, anal, or oral sex — or even just rubbing genitals together, as the virus is spread by skin-to-skin contact. Furthermore, a quarter of men are infected with cancer-causing strains of HPV. And, while the female population sees a peak in HPV infections in their early 20s, men’s HPV prevalence increases with age. While 28.9 percent of men 18 to 22 years of age carried HPV, 50.8 percent of them carried it by the time they were 28 to 32 years of age, and 59.7 percent of 58- and 59-year-olds were carriers. Continue reading