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posted by martyb on Tuesday March 06 2018, @06:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the still-have-a-long-way-to-go dept.

Naaman Zhou at The Guardian writes that Australia's free human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination programme in schools has been highly successful. The International Papillomavirus Society calculates that within 40 years, the number of new cases of cervical cancer will become nearly negligible.

HPV (human papillomavirus) is a sexually transmitted infection that causes 99.9% of cervical cancers. In 2007, the federal government began providing the vaccine for free to girls aged 12-13 years, and in 2013, it extended the program to boys.

Girls and boys outside those ages but under 19 can also access two doses of the vaccine for free. In 2016, 78.6% of 15-year old girls and 72.9% of 15-year old boys had been vaccinated.

As a result, the HPV rate among women aged 18 to 24 dropped from 22.7% to 1.1% between 2005 and 2015.

Eradication is still a few decades out but within reach. The vaccinations are backed up by more advanced cervical screening tests, which are themselves highly successful in detecting high-risk HPV infections before they turn really bad.

Source : Australia could become first country to eradicate cervical cancer. The Guardian


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by frojack on Tuesday March 06 2018, @07:25PM (7 children)

    by frojack (1554) on Tuesday March 06 2018, @07:25PM (#648624) Journal

    Carriers.

    The vaccination rate is about 75-ish percent, but that has pretty much killed off the spread of HPV. Clearly this is another example herd immunity, and one NOT yet ruined by the antivaxer crowd.

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  • (Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday March 06 2018, @08:28PM

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Tuesday March 06 2018, @08:28PM (#648663) Journal

    and one NOT yet ruined by the antivaxer crowd.

    Yet. They're working on it, though.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday March 06 2018, @08:37PM (3 children)

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Tuesday March 06 2018, @08:37PM (#648666)

    We also have this free vaccination where I live, so I expect we will see similar results.

    Our local anti-vaxxer movement is very busy trying to drum up support for their views, including a national speaking tour by some visiting loony.

    Curiously it seems to be run by midwives, not sure why that would be.

    • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 06 2018, @09:10PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 06 2018, @09:10PM (#648695)

      A national anti-vaxxer speaking tour? Oh, to be a pathogen!

      (Or what could possibly go wrong...)

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by meustrus on Tuesday March 06 2018, @09:44PM (1 child)

      by meustrus (4961) on Tuesday March 06 2018, @09:44PM (#648725)

      Curiously it seems to be run by midwives, not sure why that would be.

      Because anti-vax is ultimately about distrust of the medical establishment. Midwifery is a practice one gets into because of the exact same distrust.

      While one may be seriously harmful and the other an arguable social good, they come from the same place. To the average C student, the two are about equally valid. This serves to highlight that non-scientific practices are not necessarily wrong, but that you will find it much harder to tell which ones are.

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      • (Score: 4, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Wednesday March 07 2018, @03:49PM

        by tangomargarine (667) on Wednesday March 07 2018, @03:49PM (#649026)

        While one may be seriously harmful and the other an arguable social good, they come from the same place. To the average C student, the two are about equally valid. This serves to highlight that non-scientific practices are not necessarily wrong, but that you will find it much harder to tell which ones are.

        Hell, from all the articles I've seen here and on the green site, whenever I hear about a new scientific study I immediately think "what is the most likely lobby that would benefit from paying these scientists for their conclusion/massaging the data." If they want us to trust science they should try to be more effing trustworthy.

        New Study Demonstrates X Causes Y...but "coincidentally" most of the people in the test group were more susceptible to Y in the first place
        New Study Demonstrates X Causes Y...after quietly discarding everybody in demographic Z from the study for no adequately-explained reason and skewing the data
        New Study Demonstrates X Causes Y...in 2% of cases which, if not a rounding error, is hardly worth worrying about compared to plenty of other things in life. And here's an injection for it that costs $4000 that we want to mandate.
        New Study Demonstrates X Causes Y...ignoring about seven other potential causes, and the correlation is fairly weak.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 06 2018, @10:07PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday March 06 2018, @10:07PM (#648735)

    The anti-Vaxxers are much more concerned with infant vaccines than they are pre-pubescent vaccines.

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by stormreaver on Wednesday March 07 2018, @02:28AM

    by stormreaver (5101) on Wednesday March 07 2018, @02:28AM (#648830)

    Clearly this is another example herd immunity....

    Or it's yet another example of a disease being eradicated by something else (earlier detection and treatment being one), and the pharmaceutical industry claiming responsibility for it.