Comment by strideashort
2 months ago
Title is misleading
> Among the 859 unvaccinated women, HPV16/18 prevalence was 6%, 5%, and 6%
and
> However, about one-third of women still had HPV infection with non-vaccine high-risk HPV types, and new infections with these types were more frequent in vaccinated than in unvaccinated women.
so… real summary is “hpv vaccination correlates with lower infection for vaccine specific HPV strain, but does not impact / potentially worsens overall high-risk HPV infections”
so what exactly is solved here, supposedly?
not to mention, the study does not compare helth outcomes, which is the only meaningful measure.
I believe HPV16/18 were considered the highest risk (in terms of causing cancer), even amongst all the other high risk HPV strains. In the intro, they state that prior to the start of the vaccination campaign 74% of cervical cancer cases in Denmark were HPV16/18, and the other 26% from the non-vaccine HR HPV strains. Following through to the referenced paper, in their study they found 20.5% of overall patients had HR HPV, with 5.4% and 2.4% with HPV16 and/or 18. However, for cancer cases, they found that 40% of cases had HPV16, and 33% had HPV18 (note that multiple simultaneous strains are possible).
There's a lot in the paper to summarize, but I think it makes a reasonable argument that HPV16/18 are especially high risk, and that "simple" replacement of the 5% HPV16/18 with another 5% of any of the other HR HPV strains would be beneficial. The linked paper suggests up to 74% (depending on your assumptions) reduction in cancer with "simple replacement".