Crossposted from Nature’s news blog
Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann may have railed recently in opposition to vaccinating schoolgirls against the cancer-causing human papilloma virus (HPV), experts who advise the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) seem prepared to up the ante.
Today, on a vote of 13 in favor with one abstention, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices said that 11- and 12-year-old boys, like their female counterparts, should receive the series of three immunizations against the virus, which infects some 20 million Americans and causes cancer of the cervix, vulva, vagina, penis, and anus as well as genital warts. Studies like this one in The New England Journal of Medicine also implicate HPV as a cause of oropharyngeal (throat) cancer.
The 15-member committee, whose recommendations are widely expected to be signed off by top CDC officials in coming months, said that the vaccinations could begin in boys as young as nine years old, and that 13-to-21-year-old males who have not been vaccinated should receive catch-up vaccinations.