February 29, 2016 – HPV Drop

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Anchor lead: Good news related to the vaccine for HPV, Elizabeth Tracey reports

HPV related disease in young women is on the decline among those who’ve received the HPV vaccine, federal data reveal.  Maria Trent, an adolescent medicine expert at Johns Hopkins, describes the findings.

Trent: New data released from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that there have been dramatic declines in the rates of HPV related disease in girls in the United States. Even though we are not doing all that we can to immunize young people in the United States, we’ve still seen a dramatic decline anyway and that’s significant.  It’s about 65% decline in what we’ve been seeing.  What’s dramatic is that when we look at girls, about half of girls in the United States are getting the immunizations that they should have.  :30

Trent says declines would be even greater if more adolescent girls received the vaccine, and completed all of the doses.  She says this is proof the vaccine prevents cancer, and should persuade even the most skeptical parents to have their children immunized.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.