On the agenda

HPV Virus

A new study funded by Cancer Research UK has highlighted the importance of the national immunisation programme against the human papilloma virus (HPV).

The study found that the incidence of cervical cancer in women in their 20s has been rising by over 40 per cent in recent years.

Between 1992 and 1996 around five women aged 20-29 in every 100,000 were diagnosed with cervical cancer. The latest figures for 2007 - 2008 show this has climbed to around nine women in every 100,000.

With HPV being a major cause of cervical cancer, the findings have led to a fresh impetus to encourage parents in the UK to have their girls vaccinated as part of the immunisation programme, which has been running since 2008.

The UK government has hailed the programme as proving successful. Provisional data from the Department of Health up to the end of June 2011, published in The Guardian newspaper in November, showed that about 77% of girls in the target 12-13 age group had received the full course of HPV vaccine in the 2010/11 academic year in England.

Although still a long way from a universal take-up, such figures are at least more positive than those from across the Atlantic. The BBC has reported that as of last year, just 49% of adolescent girls in the United States had received even the first of the recommended three HPV shots, while only a third had had all three doses.

Now the US Government’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) has taken a fresh approach by recommending that boys aged 11-12 should receive the HPV vaccine as well.

The ACIP argues that vaccinating males will help offset the poor uptake among teenage girls. Immunisation will lower the boys’ risk of getting genital warts as well as oral and anal cancers. At the same time, by preventing the transmission of HPV, it will lower the incidence of cervical cancer among girls who have not been immunised themselves.

A number of medical experts in the UK have been pressing for the vaccination programme to be widened to include teenage boys for the same reasons.

The Department of Health has played down the likelihood of this happening, saying any decision would be made by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) on the available scientific evidence – and as yet there are no plans to include boys in the programme.

However, the ACIP decision this month can only add to the pressure on the JCVI to have a change of heart.