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Ed Yeates Reporting The dramatic effectiveness of a new vaccine that just might protect women from viral-triggered cervical cancer is still making waves more than a week after its announcement.
The University of Utah was one of the centers involved in the clinical trials. Women between the ages of eighteen and 30 volunteered for the clinical trials. Like any double blind scientific study, women were injected with either HPV vaccine or a placebo.
These are the files of the 45 women who participated in the University of Utah study. If you add up all the centers across the country, we're talking about close to 18-thousand women.
For the most part, the national trials ended early because early analysis of the vaccine's effectiveness went way beyond what researchers normally expect as pretty good odds.
John Kriesel, M.D./ University of Utah School of Medicine: "This is a very dramatic trial. The vaccine was highly effective, almost perfectly effective, which we haven't seen before."
In fact, historically, HPV may be making its own mark. The classic polio vaccine, which stopped an epidemic, was only 70 percent effective in its original field trials. But HPV?
John Kriesel, M.D.: "So here you have a vaccine that's almost 100 percent effective in the most susceptible people. It's pretty big news."
Big enough news that an FDA advisory committee is recommending it not just for adult women, but girls down to age nine. Some groups believe that might send the wrong sexual message to a pre-teen. But Dr. Kriesel says the vaccine should be given to young girls.
John Kriesel, M.D.: "They're protected against the serotypes contained in the vaccine and at least half of the cervical cancers in genital warts."
Any recommendation for an HPV childhood immunization package is still pending. Again, women volunteering for the trials here and at other centers across the country were between the ages of eighteen and thirty.
