Only four years after Dan Savage proposed vaccinating boys as well as girls against HPV, the Canadian province of Alberta announced plans to do just that. (The much smaller province of Prince Edward Island pioneered the practice earlier this year.) Omar Mouallem applauds the move:
Males in any HPV-immunized community already benefit from shots administered to females. Two years after Australia introduced a national vaccination program for girls in 2007, cases of genital warts in young women and men dropped 59 and 39 percent, respectively. There, in the only country to federally fund coverage of both genders since February 2013, the conversation no longer focuses solely on cervical cancer. It’s about all of the symptoms, including warts, regardless of who is more likely to be affected.
New evidence suggests that a universal program could save more lives than anticipated. Oral HPV infections are now almost three-to-one male. Some researchers believe this is because men on average have more sexual partners, but Nigel Brockton, a Calgary oncologist who studies the relationship between HPV type 16 and oral pharyngeal cancers, links this ratio to the desquamation (shedding) of infectious cells, which occurs more readily on female genitalia. With fewer Canadians smoking than a generation ago, tonsil tumors should technically be declining, but they aren’t, perhaps because cunnilingus has become standard sexual practice. Since the lag time between infection and symptoms can be decades, HPV could become as much a men’s health issue as a women’s concern before all of the evidence is in.
The Dish 