Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
ATLANTA -- An experimental vaccine that protects against a virus that causes most cases of cervical cancer appears to protect women against two other types of tumors, researchers announced Sunday.
Merck's vaccine has been widely touted as a way to protect women from cervical cancer, which afflicts nearly 10,000 Americans and about 500,000 women worldwide every year. A new study shows that the vaccine also protects against vaginal and vulvar cancers, which afflict roughly 6,100 American women a year.
Beginning in 2002, doctors randomly assigned 18,000 patients to receive either vaccine or a placebo. Twenty-four women who received the placebo developed vaginal or vulvar precancers over the next two years, but no vaccinated women did, says Jorma Paavonen of the University of Helsinki in Finland, who presented the study Sunday at the annual meeting here of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
The vaccine, called Gardasil, prevents infection with two strains of the human papillomavirus that cause cancer and two strains that cause anal and genital warts, Paavonen says. HPV is found in nearly 80% of vaginal and vulvar cancers in the USA. Removing genital tumors and affected lymph nodes is disfiguring and painful and can profoundly impair a woman's sexuality, says Robert Ozols of the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia.
The vaccine's greatest effect will be to save lives from cervical cancer, the second-most-common cause of cancer death in women worldwide; it kills about 250,000 women a year. (Breast cancer is the No. 1 cause of cancer death in women worldwide.) Studies have shown the vaccine to be 100% effective in preventing cervical cancers caused by HPV 16 and 18.
According to the World Health Organization, most victims are in developing countries. In the USA, most are poor or minority women who did not have routine screenings, which have greatly reduced the cases.
HPV is the country's most common sexually transmitted infection, affecting up to 80% of American women by age 50, says Sarina Araujo, executive director of the National Cervical Cancer Coalition. Most HPV infections clear up on their own and don't cause cancer.
A advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration has recommended approval for Gardasil. The FDA is expected to make a decision soon. GlaxoSmithKline also is developing a cervical cancer vaccine, called Cervarix.
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
© Copyright 2006 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
