Opinion: The time is now to take a shot at eliminating six cancers caused by HPV

If you had the power to eliminate several common cancers and prevent your children from developing them, you’d use it, wouldn’t you? We have that power today for cancers caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV), but we aren’t fully using our available resources, including vaccination for primary prevention and screening and treatment for precancerous changes in the cervix.

HPV causes six different kinds of cancer: cervical, oropharyngeal (throat), anal, penile, vaginal, and vulvar cancers. Shockingly, most of them are. Our best prevention tool — the HPV vaccine — hasn’t been fully utilized. , the last year for which full data are available, only 53% of eligible girls and 44% of eligible boys in the United States received the HPV vaccine. Part of the reason is that not everyone has learned what the vaccine can do. Another part is that some parents misunderstand it. We have an educational challenge. Some would say the vaccine has an image problem.