Quote:
Originally posted by
Alan & Michele
Your question was: "So if you have had the HPV vaccines, how do you know you didn't already have it?"
You don't. HPV is a retrovirus, like mononucleosis. That means the only times it will show up is when your immune system is
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Your question was: "So if you have had the HPV vaccines, how do you know you didn't already have it?"
You don't. HPV is a retrovirus, like mononucleosis. That means the only times it will show up is when your immune system is weak and the virus becomes active again (which is also the only time it can cause problems). It can do that on and off for the rest of your life.
HPV has been around since Roman times, yet you didn't hear of women dying off in droves from cervical cancer until civilization became more industrialized. I'm not saying that it isn't something to pay attention to now, but I am suggesting that we as women would be better off looking at the rest of the things our body comes in contact with as well. There are several studies that have proven that just having HPV (high risk) will NOT cause cancer by itself... it's only one thing in a chain of several that lead to it, and women with compromised immune systems (such as the ones with HIV) are the ones who really have to worry.
Women do need to protect themselves, yes, but is also has to be put in perspective so people don't have nervous breakdowns over it, particularly if they are diagnosed. The National Cancer Institute published figures that noted a woman's lifetime chance of getting breast cancer is 1 in 7, lung cancer is 1 in 17, colon cancer is 1 in 18, and cervical cancer 1 in 142. After I was diagnosed with HPV years ago, I wrote and asked how much that risk increased with the presence of high risk HPV, and they said it would put the risk at 1 in 128. That put things in perspective a bit for me, and makes me wonder why they spent time/money on a vaccine for HPV when what we really need is one for breast cancer.
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Thank you for putting this in perspective - those numbers aren't very well known. While I personally believe that the potential benefits outweigh the risks, I'm also on medications that suppress my immune system, and have had a friend who developed cervical cancer after contracting a high-risk HPV. The former reason is based on scientific fact; the latter, simply a gut feeling that I know is unscientific. At this point, it's a personal decision, and we don't have enough information to point fingers and say "This choice is right, this choice is wrong!"
As someone who has taken classes that include oncology sections, I'll tell you why they went after an HPV vaccine instead of a breast cancer vaccine: because there was a much better chance of ever being able to develop an HPV vaccine than a breast cancer vaccine. A great deal of time and money has been poured into trying to find vaccines for cancer, especially breast cancer. The fruit of this labor has been a much greater understanding of how breast breast cancer works, the genes involved, and some new therapies, but no vaccine is in sight. This HPV vaccine is the only one that has gotten this far.
When cancers are caused by mutations with no viral element, it's much harder to elicit an immune response against the cancerous cells and nothing else. (you don't want the immune system to kill you with the cancer, right?) We (the research community) are getting closer to new treatments through this research, but the HPV vaccine is the only vaccine breakthrough in cancer research that made it to production. Why? Because the problem of creating a vaccine against a relatively stable virus, even a set of relatively stable ones, is so much easier than creating a vaccine against cancer.
To put this problem in perspective for the non-scientists following the thread, it's on the order of making a wheel-barrow vs. making a multi-stage rocket. It's that much more difficult, that much more complex, and that much more dangerous when it comes time to test it on a living organism.
