Prompt:
As a healthcare professional, a colleague asks your opinion as to which HPV strains should be covered in a new treatment. Based on your reading from the Sarid and Gao 2011 article, what is your recommendation, and when should the treatment be administered? What evidence supports your opinion? Keep in mind a cost/benefit analysis, as the cost of developing a vaccine for each strain can get very pricey! (You should not indicate “all of them” in your answer, unless you have strong supporting evidence for that decision).
Response:
If a colleague asked me which HPV strains should be covered in a new treatment, I would likely say that the viral strains and high risk strains, such as HPV16 and HPV18 should be prioritized. This is because, from my understanding, we know less about them and they do a great deal of damage to humans. For example, on page 4 of this article, we see that not only are the previously mentioned strains carcinogenic, but also HPV33, 35, 39, 51, 52, 56, 58, and 59. While it would be ideal to be able to research each and every one of these strains, this would become a very tedious and incredibly expensive research operation. Thus, I think that HPV16 and HPV18 should be the focal points of vaccination research.
