Cancer statistics 2023 is out.
The incidence of cervical cancer 2012-2019 dropped a whopping 65% among women in their early 20s, the first cohort to receive HPV vaccine.
A vaccine that prevents cancer! It's amazing when you really think about it. 1/https://t.co/kmnmDwvoeS
— Noha Aboelata, MD (@NohaAboelataMD) January 22, 2023
The effort to get teens vaccinated against HPV started less than a generation ago. And it is paying off. Vaccinations provide direct protection and indirect protection in this case. Direct protection is a lower probability of a vaccinated individual getting HPV and then cervical cancer a decade or more later. Indirect protection means there are fewer opportunities for currently non-infected individuals to be infected from now vaccinated partners to then not spread it to future unvaccinated partners.
I would be surprised if we don’t see a decline in mouth and tongue cancers that can be attributed to HPV vaccination proliferation — could probably do a pretty cool analysis that leverages variation in county rate of vaccination a decade ago to get a plausible causal analysis.
Baud
Always keep pushing.
p.a.
Isn’t this the vaccine the usual bible-thumping suspects were against because sex Sex SEX?
scav
O no, the quandary for some! an improvement in the naughty body cootie bits and vaccine-enabled! Burn the experts!
Marmot
If my memory serves me right, HPV vaccines were an early dip of the right-wing toe in the waters of anti-vaccine nuttiness. Evangelicals specifically, because they felt vaccinating teens against HPV amounts to an endorsement of teen sex.
Deep thinkers, them
EDIT: I see p.a. got there first.
bbleh
Yet another attack on American Virtue™ by (((elitist))) servants of Satan with their unholy concoctions!
Soon there will no longer be painful premature deaths of slatterns and Jezebels as the Lord intended. What will we do then?!
trollhattan
Kiddo is part of the first cohort to receive this and I’m so happy for this group. Mom had to overcome her retro-hippy reflexive anti-modern medicine views to embrace the notion a cancer can be prevented and perhaps someday, eradicated, and that’s a good thing. Fuck cancer.
Omnes Omnibus
A new one, I went to my doc for a follow up visit and couple of weeks age and they were promoting Hep B vaxes for people under 60. i mentioned that I did not fit any of the Hep B risk groups and they said they are pushing it for everyone. I let them stab me. I need to go for the second part in June.
eversor
@p.a.:
Yes. It would encourage promiscuity and sex outside of waiting for marriage so it had to be shut down. It’s the same freakout as to birth control, abortion, no fault divorce, and everything else they are hopping mad about.
trollhattan
@Omnes Omnibus: Huh, never heard of this before.
Am pondering the pneumonia one, because it nailed mom once and thereafter her scarred lungs made her susceptible to every cold that came along, colds that often led back to pneumonia.
Old School
@Omnes Omnibus:
Probably a better option than assuming drug users will be forthcoming about it.
Omnes Omnibus
@Old School: I was wearing a sweater. They couldn’t see my arms.
narya
Oh how I wish this vaccine had been available for me. As for the others, I’ve had the shingles shots, and I’ll probably get the pneumovax as well. My old workplace was starting to require Hep A and Hep B for everyone (and they would provide it), but I never got around to getting stabbed before the pandemic. I’ll take it up w/ my doc later this year.
Tom Levenson
Ha!
I’m on the last chapter of my book on germ theory, and I just finished the passage about smallpox eradication and am about to go on a whirlwind tour of other successes that derive from the insights gained in the late 19th c. HPV vaccine is one of them! I’ll steal* a factoid from your post, David. Thanks.
*Amateurs borrow. Professionals steal.
Marmot
@trollhattan: Glad to hear it.
What’s behind her anti-modern medicine reflex—the way pregnant women have been treated, say, or some other dumb high-handedness?
Relative of mine is no antivaxxer, and he doesn’t say “toxin,” but he’s got this idea that unspecified things accumulate in your body to cause unspecified harm. Things in oysters, things in the fumes of cleaning supplies.
Makes me wonder if there’s some body-impurity phobia fueling anti-vax b.s.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
I recall Pfizer introducing an mRNA vaccine for melanoma into clinical trials a while back. Wonder how those are going? I also wondered…melanoma usually starts as pre-melanoma cells – presumably having the vaccine might kill those cells off and not just cure melanoma but prevent it from forming in the first place.
Tom Levenson
@narya: As a Hep A endurer, let me evangelize for the A/B shot. A is no fun at all, and B can be long-term debilitating and even fatal. Get the shots.
Sure Lurkalot
Can’t be said enough. Diagnosed with cervical cancer in 1986, and underwent a total hysterectomy at 32. Please to promote this vaccine far and wide to our youths!
H-Bob
@trollhattan: I got and strongly recommend the pneumonia vaccine. Apparently pneumonia is very opportunistic and gets you when you’ve been with sick with a different ailment (e.g., flu or covid). I didn’t notice significant side effects.
Scout211
This is amazing news! I see that they are now recommending HPV vaccinations for adults up to 26 now. I guess to catch those in their 20s now that were not in the first cohort
Currently, only approved for age 65 and older.
bbleh
@Marmot: Moral Foundations Theory posits that one of the “dimensions” of morality more often rated more highly by self-described “conservatives” than self-described “liberals” is “purity.” That is, conservatives are more likely to consider things they believe are “pure” to be morally “good.” Hence the fetish about the “unborn,” the importance of chastity (in women, natch), etc.
The Moar You Know
@Omnes Omnibus: I got mine about twenty years ago, in my thirties, and I had to fight for it every step of the way. “Why?” Well, San Diego had and still has fairly frequent Hep A and B outbreaks. Almost always in restaurants. I eat out a lot. They grumbled and stalled and I ended up doing it off-insurance because the insurer was being a royal PITA about it.
It’s a common disease that can have some pretty nasty consequences, why isn’t it part of the regular schedule?
Omnes Omnibus
@The Moar You Know: Isn’t the story I just told a sign that it is becoming part of the common schedule?
The Moar You Know
@Marmot: Oyster shell is frequently used in musical instrument inlays. Cutting, grinding and drilling shell releases small amounts of nerve gas, of all things (don’t remember which one). Inlay artists should use respirators.
scav
Oddly enough, just read Beethoven probably had Heb B and it likely contributed to his death.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Scout211: I turned 65 a few months ago. I don’t feel any older, but all of a sudden there’s all this new health guidance. So my doc insisted on the pneumonia shot this week, and my wife insisted on a shingles shot a couple weeks ago.
It occurred to me at some point that a lot of these age-related cutoffs are completely arbitrary. It’s just the way some researcher decided to slice their populations for the statistics. Here are the stats for 50-59, here’s 60-69, here’s 70 and up. If they happened to slice it at 63.4 for purposes of the publication, that would be the magic number where suddenly “you need to get a pneumonia shot”.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Sure Lurkalot:
I lost a cousin to cervical cancer. This is very good news.
Mart
@p.a.: Yes. we were attacked by two couples for getting two young teen daughters vaccinated. I said wtf?, you never had sex as a teenager.
The Moar You Know
@trollhattan: get it. I got pneumonia in my forties and that was some bullshit, and I made my doctors give it to me. If you’ve had it its a lot easier to convince them to waive the age limit.
jonas
Can’t find the link at the moment, but somewhere on YouTube or Instagram or somewhere, there’s an epic rant by Dr. Jen Gunter — the popular ob/gyn/Goop woo debunker — about these health products that offer to “detoxify” you or “flush accumulated waste” from your body. She’s basically screaming “That’s what your liver and kidneys do!! If they didn’t, you’d die! So if you’re alive, and not receiving dialysis or something, they’re currently ‘detoxifying’ you quite well. For free!”
Marmot
@bbleh: Interesting! Looks like I have some reading to do.
This relative is no conservative. But with conservatives in general, I’m inclined to dismiss their moral claims because they pretty much always involve enforcing the social order.
But hey, maybe altering the social order means contaminating its purity.
The Moar You Know
@Omnes Omnibus: Yes. But it’s not universal, don’t know of any health care chain here in SD doing it for all comers. Not yet. Will be soon enough.
Anonymous At Work
Cervical cancer and the HPV vaccine are kind of a special case. It’s like mesothelioma lung cancer: A singular cause to a very specific form of cancer. Cervical cancer is caused by the HPV virus, unlike other forms of cancer which are caused by “Dunno!” and mesothelioma is caused by asbestos in the lungs.
Seanly
@p.a.:
Yes, the threat of cervical cancer was necessary to keep the sluts from slutting around like the sluts we all know they are.
Gretchen
@p.a.: I saw someone on twitter just yesterday saying that it’s a hard decision for parents, and she thought that teaching kids about healthy relationships and good choices was a good substitute. I knew someone who married her high school sweetheart and died of cervical cancer in her early 30s, leaving two young children.
Matt McIrvin
@bbleh: Alt-medicine woo is definitely all about purity as the guarantor of health. That’s attractive across the political spectrum, though I do think people underestimate how much religious conservatives are into it (they peddle alt-med stuff to each other through MLM schemes).
Marmot
@The Moar You Know:
Ha—that’s amazing. Reminds me of how you can accidentally make phosgene in some industrial settings. But it’s not the kind of thing that “builds up in your system,” which is central to the belief.
EDIT: whoops block quote
Matt McIrvin
@Gretchen: It was not a hard decision for us AT ALL.
Mart
@H-Bob: I got pneumonia a couple weeks after Covid. CDC recommended pneumonia shot schedules: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/pneumo/hcp/who-when-to-vaccinate.html
trollhattan
@H-Bob: Good to hear, thank you!
Marmot
@The Moar You Know: I had pneumonia, and I liked it not one bit. Thanks for the tip!
Matt McIrvin
@Anonymous At Work: There’s a line of conspiracy bullshit, dating from the 1970s I think, stating that ALL cancers are caused by two or three specific viruses and that Big Cancer is trying to hide it from you. It seems to be associated with tobacco/cancer denialism particularly.
Marmot
@jonas: Awesome. I’d watch that.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Mart: How about if their daughters get it from their husbands? Would that be good with them?
Anonymous At Work
@Matt McIrvin: Maybe but those specific cancers are specific-cause-driven. Getting rid of asbestos (safely!) and HPV vaccine against the virus and its variants will get rid of the issue, so much as possible. I mean, there are other ways to irritate the lining of the lungs to produce cancer and HPV has too many variants to guard against but the end results speak for themselves.
eversor
@bbleh:
Oh it’s not just chastity in women. They are highly against young men ruining their moral purity through porn and masturbation as well. They are against sex completely, outside of the biblical partriarchal marriage arrangement. However when the inevitable happens it’s the woman’s fault. Because it’s their role to guard chastity. So if sexy time breaks out, she seduced him and both screw ups land on her.
There’s a reason all these modern “alt-right” movements advocate no masturbation and getting into traditional marriages and are strewn through with trad-caths. There’s also a whole movement around not giving bimbos your seed and saving it for the trad wife you find.
It’s all very odd cause you can’t stop people from fucking. I can’t think of a more futile crusade to wage.
Gretchen
@Matt McIrvin: no, shouldn’t be hard. When my oldest was about 12 the pediatrician said she should get it. My first thought was that my daughter won’t be having teenage sex. As if he heard my thoughts, he next said “most parents think their kid won’t need it but some of them are wrong so I recommend it for everyone.” That was enough to get me to approve it. The suffering her cousin’s wife went through before her death, and the continued suffering of her motherless children, shows me the value of just getting the shot.
JCJ
@Gretchen:
I have told people that I have no idea what hobbies someone will have later in life, so the vaccine is a fine idea. I have a new colleague who wants to treat all of the head and neck cancer in our group so I have not treated a base of tongue cancer or tonsillar cancer caused by HPV for a few months. Many of my patients have been cured, but seven weeks of radiation, frequently with concurrent chemotherapy, is a difficult course. I still treat the occasional HPV caused anal cancer which is also a tough course of radiation. Another colleague treats cervical cancer, but I sometimes cover for her. It is hard to understand any rationale for not getting a vaccine which could prevent these.
Kelly
When I went in for my Shingrix shot the pharmacist recommended the pneumonia shot. Had her do both. An oddity in my medical history is I had TB as toddler in 1958. A great uncle was an asymptomatic carrier. Tends to get raised eyebrows whenever a new doc reviews my medical history. They were surprised I caught it in 1958 but apparently it slipped in before I had that vaccination. More recently the news provokes a discussion along the lines of “Dammit we had TB nailed down and now we have these drug resistant strains popping up due to superstition.”
eversor
@Matt McIrvin:
Not entirely a bunch of it is based off some other factors. If you’ve ever been around someone who just moved here or their families did you’re probably going to run into a lot of eat this/drink that type cures. These range from logical (consuming a ton of stuff we actually know scientifically is good for you in extreme quanities, and since most of us eat junk that’s good advice period), to the utterly bonkers.
Then you have the “magical mystical minority” syndrome. Where cure X must be better because it was not created by white capitalists.
I’ll eat the funky soups and drink the wonky drinks the SO whips up but I’m still taking the pills.
bbleh
@jonas: Oh sure, that’s just what Big Liver and Big Kidney want you to think.
CaseyL
When I was diagnosed with Type II diabetes at age 63, my HCP sent me off to get the shingles and pneumonia vaccines immediately, even though I hadn’t yet crossed the 65+ threshold. This was pre-Covid, so there wasn’t a general rush by everyone else to get them. Other than a very sore arm, I don’t remember having strong reactions to either one.
OTOH, I think the current standard of practice regarding Hep A and B is, at my age and with my lifestyle, I’m at very little risk so there’s no reason to get the shot(s).
bbleh
@Matt McIrvin: oh for sure; it’s not to say it’s not valued by “liberals” (we prefer “pure” air and water and food, and there often is some moral significance mixed in there), and I think there’s something to it in the political “horseshoe” phenomenon where some extremists consider “purity” of a political movement at least as important as functional efficacy. But in surveys, it tends to be more important to conservatives on average.
TriassicSands
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
I just read an article about an mRNA melanoma vaccine — amazingly, the article didn’t identify the maker — and it seems that the purpose of the vaccine plus immunotherapy is to prevent recurrence of melanoma, not preventing an initial case. It’s in Phase II trials right now. If all goes well, they should start Phase III later in the year and if that is successful, approval within three years. However, it is not the vaccine alone, but the combination of the vaccine and a monoclonal antibody (Pembrolizumab — Keytruda).
Note: That seems to be a treatment from Moderna and Merck, not Pfizer.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@CaseyL: They recommend the newer shingles vaccine a lot younger. I went to a county flu shot drive the October before the pandemic started and the guy said I was eligible for the shingles vaccine. I was like, isn’t that for 70 year olds? I’m 51 and he said no they have a new one that’s more effective and is recommended for 50+. I’m glad I got it but it was a doozy…I felt really feverish and sick for 24 hours. Worst I’ve ever felt after a vaccine. Same thing happened with the second dose.
jonas
Still divine punishment for marrying someone who should have kept his pants zipped before marriage.
ARoomWithAMoose
They keep modifying the HPV vaccines to cover more HPV variants, at this point they cover several of the known variants that cause cancer and a few of the ones known to cause warts.
Get the teen boys vaccinated too, don’t let them be vectors or victims either (not all HPV caused cancers or warts limit themselves to ladyparts).
Marmot
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: I got this one, and I’m in your cohort. Didn’t make me sick but it … burns? … when you get the shot. Like a lot.
Beats having freaking shingles! Like a lot.
JGreen
When I was getting the COVID vaccines, my health care records kept showing that I was due for Hepatitis vaccines, shingles vaccines and the pneumonia vaccine. I got the Hepatitis ones even though I didn’t seem to fit the criteria for the ones more likely to get it. I thought I signed up for shingles vaccines, but I couldn’t find any record of getting them and couldn’t remember if I had gotten them or not and guess what? I came down with a beauty of a case of shingles ten weeks ago and…I STILL HAVE THE GODDAM THING! It doesn’t hurt much; it just itches occasionally, but IT WON’T GO AWAY. You bet I’ll get the vaccine if it ever goes away. And I wasn’t sure about the pneumonia vaccine, but I am now. And, I’m getting the next COVID booster as soon as I can. I’m definitely in the eligible group.
Now, if someone could do something about the problem that’s really making me sick (don’t ask unless you want a very, very long answer).
Suzanne
My Spawns have absolutely received Gardasil!
Ohio Mom
@Scout211: That’s what my PCP told me, I was too young for the pneumonia shot and I said, “But I have asthma.” And she made a face like D’oh and said, “Yes, you are right, I’ll have the nurse come in with it when we are finished.”
I don’t know what other conditions would allow an early pneumonia shot, I’m guessing any sort of chronic lung disease for starters.
Yutsano
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: You also have a guaranteed payor for all those recommendations now. But that can’t be a reason for all that right?
Ohio Mom
@trollhattan: When I was younger, young enough to rarely have need for a visit to a doctor, I was a bit suspicious of medicine in general. I would have said I wouldn’t take any drug that had recently been developed, let someone else be the Guinea pig.
Now, many years (and medical conditions) later, I am one of Western medicine’s biggest boosters. We have taken new medicines in this family, medicines with unknown long-term side-effects, and we once enrolled Ohio Son (with his permission) in a drug trial. Talk about being a Guinea pig.
So I might chalk up your wife’s initial reluctance to a similar feeling of unease because it’s all unfamiliar and new.
evodevo
@The Moar You Know:
It’s the same toxin you get from “red tide” organisms…oysters are filter feeders and they pick it up from the dinoflagellates they eat. ends up in their tissues and then in their shell….