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HPV vaccine for boys 'will prevent thousands of cancers'
[UK] health officials say the HPV vaccine for 12 to 13-year-old boys, starting after the summer, will prevent 29,000 cancers in UK men in the next 40 years. The boys will be eligible from the start of the new school year, 11 years after girls were first vaccinated.
The jab protects against human papilloma virus, which causes many oral, throat and anal cancers.
[...] Why are boys now getting the jab? Because the programme to vaccinate teenage girls, and reduce cervical cancers, has proved very successful.
There has been a reduction in HPV infections, genital warts and pre-cancerous growths in teenage girls and young women since the vaccine was introduced. Other groups, like teenage boys, have seen benefits too because the virus is not being passed on to them. To protect boys even more, and reduce cancers of the anus, penis and head and neck in the future, health experts say they should be offered the HPV vaccine too.
Also at The Guardian and The Telegraph.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 11 2019, @12:27AM (2 children)
Vax, vax, vax. And the Big Pharma are rolling into the bank at the dumbness of idiots and the NHS. Only vax what is needed. This is drumming up millions if not billions in business out of thin air. Big Pharma are there to benefit the shareholders, NOT to help sick people. Hello, get THAT firmly in your head before you spew your millenialism all over us.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by nitehawk214 on Thursday July 11 2019, @04:41AM (1 child)
I enjoy that alex-jones libertarians and hippie social media moms have found something to agree on.
I don't enjoy that both groups of loonies are a danger to public health.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 11 2019, @10:18AM
Funny old world, isn't it?
Fine and well, though I have yet to see any mention of the drug companies acting 'pro bono publico' here in any way other than manufacturing the vaccine, It's one thing to recoup your R&D costs, but I think they'll be making quite a nice profit out of this.
If there was a system in place where the drug companies had zero influence on health and political decisions regarding public health policy, if their lobbyists didn't exist, if the revolving door betwixt these companies and politics, health departments, etc. didn't exist, then I think the two groups you mention above might be a wee bit happier, not totally, but a wee bit.
I've a lot to thank the NHS for and I'm in no way against these vaccinations per se, especially given their stated efficacy, however, thanks to concerns about the undue influence of, as you USians call it, 'Big Pharma', that doesn't mean I've completely unqualified trust in the stated reasoning behind these attempts at making it another mandatory vaccination.
People, especially those outside the UK, seem to view the NHS as some sort of monolithic 'socialist' entity, they apparently don't know the extent of the increasing lucrative (for their shareholders) involvement of 'private healthcare' contractors in the running of it (thank you, Tony Fucking Blair..), so, not liking where I see this all going, on a bad day you could count me in with your loonies (not every day, mark you, just the bad days when I see the shit my sister - who has a long term degenerative illness - has to put up with when dealing with the NHS and knowing that it wasn't this way even less than a decade ago)
[Disclosure: Back in the 70's I was, as a child, an unwitting guinea pig for the trials of an anti-asthma drug by my then family Doctor (wearing his drug company consultant hat)...my parents, being of the generation who treated Doctors as 'gods amongst men' never questioned the various pills I'd been given and what they were doing to me, we only found out what had been going on when we changed family Doctor and he went through my records, and was not happy with what he saw, so forgive me if I question their stated motives on occasion]