There’s been a major change in the government regulations on prevention of cancers related to HPV. An estimated 80% of sexually active Americans have been exposed to the human pappilomavirus — and for a small percentage of those people — HPV will eventually lead to cancer.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just approved the use of the HPV vaccine for people up to age 45. Previously, the vaccine had only been approved for children and young adults, up to age 26. This is big news. The HPV vaccine, called Gardasil, protects against nine strains of the human pappilomavirus, including those most likely to cause cancer and genital warts. The vaccine can still have an effect even if you’ve already been exposed to a few strains of HPV, as long as you haven’t been exposed to all nine of the strains the vaccine protects against.
Read MoreThere has been a lot of controversy about the safety of the vaccine, and the fact that people associate it with sex — but the doctors SurvivorNet consulted about it say it’s absolutely safe, and there’s no valid reason to put your health at risk by avoiding it. “There’s always a risk of some vaccine-related side effects,” says Dr. Jessica Geiger, of the Cleveland Clinic Cancer Center. “Local site injection, pain, some redness, some swelling. There are no syndromes, such as autism or other neurologic syndromes, that have been linked to the HPV vaccines. The truth is that hundreds of thousands of young boys and girls over the years have been successfully vaccinated and they don’t have any side effects.”
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