HPV jabs cut risk of dying from cervical cancer before 30 to almost zero

100 pointsposted 4 days ago
by toomuchtodo
(theguardian.com)

40 Comments

alistairSH

an hour ago

Reducing deaths is great, but shouldn’t they also mention the reduction in treatment (which is usually surgical or chemo, both of which are massively expensive, traumatic, and life altering in negative ways).

apparent

an hour ago

They could do that, but given how low the base rate is, the reduction in number of procedures (and the resulting negative impacts on the women) would be incredibly low. It seems the base rate for cervical cancer deaths under 30 was already near zero.

Arodex

an hour ago

>the base rate for cervical cancer deaths under 30 was already near zero.

It has never been zero between 1970 and 2019. It has been completely 0 between 2020 and 2024.

apparent

43 minutes ago

Not according to the age-bucked histogram in the data you linked to below.

JumpCrisscross

an hour ago

> given how low the base rate is, the reduction in number of procedures (and the resulting negative impacts on the women) would be incredibly low

Correct. These data are more a preview of what we can expect to see as the vaccinated cohort (in countries that aren’t pro-disease) advances in age.

eek2121

an hour ago

Just a note: the article focuses on the ladies, but men should absolutely get it as well because it cuts risk for other types of cancers. I was looking for a better link, however this is the only one I found (I had an older one saved, however I can't find it):

https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/24/health/hpv-men-vaccine-cancer...

m101

an hour ago

yes! Apparently the rate of penile and throat cancer occurs at only half the rate in men as it does as cervical cancer in women, but the harm caused by the male versions of the cancer are worse, so in actual fact it may overall cause more harm in the male population.

TZubiri

42 minutes ago

My bet is that it has to do with the mechanics of receptive vaginal and oral sex, the penis just reaches deeper and causes more lesions. Compared to insertive vaginal sex and oral vaginal performance, those lesions would be less frequent and on more distal parts of the body.

If the rate is 50%, I'd also expect MSM to be overrepresented there, which would make the difference of risk between heterosexual sex even more imbalanced.

blcknight

an hour ago

For some reason not really talked about in mainstream medicine for straight men. It makes no sense. Very safe vaccine and you're eligible into your 40's to get it. Everyone sexually active probably has some strains but not all.

Avshalom

27 minutes ago

the reason is no one realized hpv was connected to much more than cervical cancer until fairly recently.

AngryData

an hour ago

Glad to see it, except it is still a sensationalist headline IMO because HPV deaths, and specifically below 30 years old, is already extremely low.

Arodex

an hour ago

As mentioned already several times in the comments, there is also a long tail of people who survive but after a grueling and costly treatment that disrupt their lives.

nikolay

13 minutes ago

My oldest daughter almost died from the first Gardasil, so you may not die from cervical cancer, but die from something else. I am not against vaccines; my kids are all fully vaccinated on a spaced-out schedule and not taking more than one shot in at least 2 months, and so am I, but the HPV vaccine was not mandatory, so, given the experience and the similar genetics, we didn't do it for the other two kids. Yeah, there's a risk of cancer, which might be curable 5-10-15 years from now, but the risk of side effects is here now... for some. So, it's not always a win-win, and we've got no interest from health authorities in assessing the risk for my other two kids, so they also seem very risk-averse and want us to assume all the negatives.

arjie

30 minutes ago

Every time HPV comes up, someone says “guys should get the vaccine too” but I’ve never managed to succeed. Even after last time someone mentioned it I tried and I got the absolutely worst result where they recorded me as being given it but then said it wasn’t meant for men my age. Had to get it removed from the record by the One Medical people I saw next.

And when I saw them, they said it wouldn’t be covered under insurance and would be like $1.2k. I intended to just get it on my next visit to India but ended up not traveling.

I don’t get it. Is this like those Internet memes “don’t mess with the postal police” and stuff or is it a real thing? Any guy in their late 30s in the US who managed to get it?

ggm

23 minutes ago

American experience. It's free in Australia for people aged 12-25 and men who have sex with men (increased risks) and nothing like that price for private script.

iknowstuff

17 minutes ago

Yes I got Gardasil 9 for free in San Francisco.

Supermancho

30 minutes ago

Why is a this news headline using the slang "jabs"?

graeme

27 minutes ago

In the UK it's commonly said, and the Guardian is a UK paper.

Though you've noticed a real thing: for some reason during and after the pandemic publications outside of the UK started saying it too and I don't know why.

rationalist

17 minutes ago

My guess is because it has a negative connotation (the pre-2020 definition of jabbing someone was to hit someone, not inject someone).

apothegm

4 days ago

From what risk level without them? How many people actually die of cervical cancer before age 30??

I mean, vaccinations and cancer prevention are both great, but this headline is ridiculous.

pfdietz

2 hours ago

The estimated number of deaths from cervical cancer in the US in 2026 is 4,200. The death rate is 2.2 per 100,000 people down from 3.1 per 100,000 in 1992.

If we multiply 3.1e-5 by 50 years that's about a 0.15% chance of dying of this cancer. The HPV shots cost $500-1000 for the three shots, so the cost per life saved is about $650K. With the statistical value of a human life being about $12M this is quite cost effective.

I'm assuming the reduction in death continues to later in life after 30, but that's a reasonable assumption, IMO.

Gigachad

an hour ago

Even if you just consider all of those 4000 + survivors would have got treatment for the cancer after getting it which costs far more than a vaccine.

JumpCrisscross

2 hours ago

> From what risk level without them?

“Approximately 0.6 percent of women will be diagnosed with cervical cancer at some point during their lifetime, based on 2021–2023 data” [1].

Given “reports of serious health issues after HPV vaccination were consistently rare—around 1.8 per 100,000 HPV vaccine doses, or 0.0018%” [2], a woman suffers a 300x higher hazard (assuming we measure a serious vaccine reaction as being equivalent to cancer, which is silly) from going unvaccinated.

> How many people actually die of cervical cancer before age 30?

4,462 young women under the age of 30 died of cervical cancer in 2022 worldwide [3].

[1] https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/cervix.html

[2] https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2021...

[3] https://gco.iarc.who.int/today/en/dataviz/pie?mode=populatio... Mortality, cervix uteri, females, 0 to 29

comrade1234

2 hours ago

Your questions are sort-of answered in the article. 3300 die each year of cervical cancer in the uk. So at 0% it saves 3300 lives per year. However the vaccination is fairly new so they have to wait longer to see if it applies 20-years, 30-years, etc later. I assume it would though.

lithocarpus

2 hours ago

Parent's question isn't answered in the article - no figure is given for how many deaths under 30 there are as a baseline.

From the article:

“We estimate that since its introduction [in 2008], HPV vaccination has prevented nearly 200 young women from dying from cervical cancer in England.”

This is an estimate of 200 total of any age total across 18 years. The article doesn't say 3300 die each year, 3300 are diagnosed each year.

estebank

an hour ago

The BBC article had that more comparable information: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c621z28z138o

> Between 2020 and 2024, no cervical cancer deaths were recorded in women aged 20 to 24 - the first time that had happened over a five-year period.

> Without vaccination, around 23 deaths would have been expected.

Note the first chart in the link showing the historical trend for the 20-24 cohort since 2000 plumetting from 25 to 0.

apparent

an hour ago

Out of curiosity, have there been any other advances in medicine that would make it less likely that women would die from cervical cancer before hitting 30? I don't keep up on oncology developments, but I assume that this particular shot is not the only thing that has reduced cervical cancer deaths in women under 30. If they were looking at rates of acquiring cancer, that would be more focused on this intervention.

estebank

19 minutes ago

I'm not a doctor and certainly not an oncologist.

The CDC mentions that not smoking and wearing condoms also lower the risk.

https://www.cdc.gov/cervical-cancer/prevention/index.html

Anecdotally people smoke less thant they uses to. Don't know what condom usage rates have done in the past quarter century.

> I assume that this particular shot is not the only thing that has reduced cervical cancer deaths in women under 30.

Why would you assume that when presented with a study that tracks with long standing belief in the medical community that the HPV vaccine works?

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

Arodex

an hour ago

>From what risk level without them? How many people actually die of cervical cancer before age 30??

All the data is there:

https://crukcancerintelligence.shinyapps.io/CancerStatsDataH...

It was literally a google "death cervical cancer UK" away.

apparent

an hour ago

So 5 deaths across 3 years? Doesn't seem worth a headline, especially since it could literally just be noise in the data.

Also, no need to post snarkily about LMGTFY. TFA should have included the base rate, and the fact that it didn't signals that it's not much of a reduction. It also signals that the journalist who wrote it is more in it for clicks than conveying accurate information.

bonsai_spool

an hour ago

Absolutely is - this is such a no-brainer of a public health intervention. We're not touching on the cost of treatment (including inability to have future children! very much something a State should be interested in avoiding).

Arodex

an hour ago

Your answer reveals you are unable to analyse statistical data

There has always been deaths in the 20-24 y.o. slice since data collection started in 1970 and here we have 0 deaths between 2020 and 2024. If you can't work out that it is statistically significant, stop commenting about what is and isn't "noise" and learn statistics. And look at yourself in the mirror about giving lessons about "accurate information" and being "more in it for clicks".

apparent

an hour ago

The linked chart shows that there were none in the 20-24 age range during the during the recent few years. Is the entire population vaccinated? If not (the article doesn't claim this), then the fact that no one in that age range died (and only 5 in the entire under-30 cohort) tends to indicate that it was not a very high base rate.

Are there other sources that show data going back to the 1970s? Probably! I didn't go searching for them. I looked at what was linked above and saw there were very few. As I said, the Guardian journalist didn't include a base rate, which surely would have been included if it bolstered the argument.

EDIT: I just scrolled down further and saw that even the chart that shows trends over time (which I hadn't seen before, having stopped scrolling earlier) doesn't support your point. It shows there were roughly .2 deaths per year per 100k. Not having any deaths in 20-24 for 3 years is not a statistically significant difference, I would imagine, than the .2 figure. Also, there are undoubtedly other cancer-related advances that have made it less likely that a young woman would die of any kind of cancer.

And the data regarding under-30 deaths is muddled because the next bucket up is 25-34, and we don't know what it is up to 29.

Lastly, at the bottom there's this disclaimer, which makes it even harder to tell what's going on with small numbers:

> Note: Non-zero counts of 5 or less are suppressed and presented as 5.

If you have another source, please feel free to share. What we've seen so far (nothing in TFA, nothing of import in the commenter's linked data) isn't remotely compelling.

Arodex

an hour ago

>Are there other sources that show data going back to the 1970s? Probably! I didn't go searching for them.

I just gave the link with data going back to 1970...

You are not a serious person. Please stop being noise.

apparent

41 minutes ago

Your source doesn't say what you think it says, as evidenced by your other mistaken comments in this thread. I was referring to other sources (other than the one you posted, which doesn't say what you think it does) because I wanted to know if anything supported your claims.

Please stop with the ad hominem business, which is frowned upon by the HN guidelines (I see you're new here).

kelipso

44 minutes ago

I remember this vaccine being part of political discourse, so I everyone should be extremely skeptical of any news about it.

seattle_spring

a few seconds ago

The only ones making the HPV vaccine "political" are the morons who think it shouldn't be administered because it increases promiscuity.