We have a VACCINE against CANCER. For 20 years now! The first Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, Gardasil, was approved in June, 2006. Since then, the rate of cervical cancer has dropped by 62 percent in the United States. HPV also causes vulvar, vaginal, anal, and penile, tongue, and throat cancers, and the several HPV vaccines now available protect against them as well.
Most people don’t know! They don’t know HPV is a huge public health risk for so many kinds of cancer, or that a vaccine can protect them and their kids. Anyway, happy anniversary to one of the biggest public health victories of the 21st century.
Just imagine how many more lives could be saved if people weren’t so squeamish about sex. Ess-ee-ecks. HPV is still the most common sexually transmitted disease in the U.S. That’s how you get it, through sex. It causes genital warts as well as cancer. It’s extremely contagious, and it infects many kinds of human tissue. One of my favorite descriptions, from a story I edited in Slate a while ago about why gay men should be screened: “HPV is like glitter. It goes everywhere.”
The vaccine was initially recommended for girls, now also boys, age 11-12. The idea is to protect them before they’re “exposed to the virus,” which is a euphemism for before their mouths or genitals come into contact with the mouths or genitals of other people who have HPV.
You can imagine what a challenge these basic facts are for public health messaging. From a parent’s perspective, their 6th-grader was just a toddler, like, five minutes ago. Too many parents refuse to believe their kids will ever have a rich and varied sex life someday and they do not want to think about it.
Purity culture is deadly. Theocrats and anti-vaxxers claimed the HPV vaccine would encourage girls and women to be more promiscuous. It does not. Just like how people taught abstinence-only sex miseducation and raised to believe they’ll never-ever-ooh-gross-how-shameful have sex before marriage aren’t less likely to have sex before marriage. They’re more likely to have unprotected and risky sex.
The anti-vaccine movement loves purity culture. It’s core to their creepy gender-essentialism and their eugenicist message of clean, all-natural living. They want natural? The most natural thing in the history of humankind is to die of infectious disease.
The messaging for boys is tricky because gay men are more susceptible to HPV-caused anal cancer than straight men, so there’s homophobia to deal with. And the vaccine still has a reputation for being a girl’s vaccine, and there’s nothing worse (to some parents) than a boy doing girl stuff.
The rate of HPV-related oropharyngeal (head and neck) cancer in men has been rising for a few decades. HPV has historically been a genital infection, but due to “changing sexual behaviors” (that is, performing oral sex), the HPV glitter bomb is infecting more men’s throat, tongue, and tonsil tissue. (Liz Szabo has a nice series on HPV tied to the 20th anniversary that goes into this more deeply, which I highly recommend.)
Even adult messaging is a little … vague. People whose parents don’t love them didn’t get them vaccinated are advised to get vaccinated as adults, up to age 26. The recommendations advise people older than 26 to consider vaccination “based on discussion with their clinician.” That discussion is, basically: “Do you intend to have more sexual partners? If so, great, go get vaccinated.”
The HPV vaccination rate is still too low, especially in rural areas. Anti-vaxxer grifters and conspiracy theorists keep spreading lies and fear about all vaccines, and especially HPV. And as with any public health success, it’s hard for people to comprehend all the agony that has been prevented. We don’t talk enough about things that worked. Vaccines work, and the HPV vaccine works. It prevents cancer! For 20 years! We should celebrate this, with glitter.
