Let's not confuse "causes mental retardation" with "prevents cancer" again, mmkay?
Good news, if you care about public health and/or don't want the people you care about to get cancer: Although only one-third of teenage girls have gotten the HPV vaccine, a new study finds that it's working.
The study used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to compare the proportion of girls and women 14-59 who had certain types of HPV before and after the vaccination program began. Rates in young women infected with the virus dropped 56% from the period 2003-06 to 2007-10.
Doctors aren't sure why the decline is so great given that only 46% of young women have received at least one dose and only 32% have received all three. It could be what's called herd immunity, in which the vaccinated women lower the overall amount of the virus in the population, thus lowering infection rates for everyone, said Lauri Markowitz, lead author of the study. "This decline is encouraging, given the substantial health and economic burden of HPV-associated disease," she said.
That's the great thing about herd immunity: Even the kids of people who think the HPV vaccine might somehow encourage their kids to have sex will benefit as the levels of HPV in the population go down.
Other countries have much higher vaccination rates; in Australia, 70 percent of teenage girls have been vaccinated. But then, Michele Bachmann hasn't been campaigning for president of Australia on the claim that the HPV vaccine causes "mental retardation."