Dr Diane Harper of the New Hamshire Dartmouth Medical School and the lead author of a new study on cevical cancers, reported in the British online medical journal, Lancet that more than 80 per cent of cervical cancers could be eradicated in the near future by a long-lasting vaccine that has been 100 percent effective in killing off four papillomavirus (HPV) types which are responsible for the vast majority of cervical cancers.
The HPV viruses can be passed between men and women during intercourse. A woman's risk of getting cervical cancer is increased if they are sexual active or have many sexual partners. The disease kills about half million women a year worldwide and is second to breast cancer as the leading cause of deaths in females.
Back in 2004, Ms Harper and her team showed that the vaccine was successful in fighting the HPV 16, HPV 18, HPV 45 and HPV 31 viruses. This study is a follow-up and suggest that the vaccine might only need to be administered once, except for one (maybe) booster shot! The life of the vaccine is important as HPV viruses can do it's dirty work silently over a period of a decade or more before the onset of cancer.
HPV can live on the outer cervical tissue for up to three years before moving into lower cell layers where it can cause cells to mutate into cancer cells. The vaccine would be given to males and females in their teens because during puberty, cervical tissues are changing very rapidly making the area more vulnerable.
Since the vaccine only targets 4 of the 15 types of HPV viruses out there, it is important that women should still take their regular Pap test, where a sample of cervical tissue is taken from the cervix and tested for markers which will indicate if cancer cells are present.
Ms Harper is conducting clinical vaccine trials at Dartmouth with the help of GlaxoSmithKline and Merck and is not being paid by either company.
There are similar studies showing great results from cervical cancer vaccines and hopefully when all the studies are published, they will have enough information to lick this thing for good. But this is a major breakthrough!
Interestingly, an increasing number of studies seem to indicate that a number of cancers are caused by viral infections. So it's important to boost your immune system to fight off these viral invaders.