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?
Quite a few strains of HPV are sexually transmitted. Therefore, I think it is important to emphasize safe sex at a young age. I think both physicians and parents providing avenues for their children to have safe sex if they are having sex is important. Education of the risks of HPV is an important preventive treatment. However, this can obviously not be the only treatment. Education and safe sex are important for preventing the types of strains we do not have vaccines for yet. Secondly, if we want to focus on specific strains for a new treatment HPV31 and HPV46 is where we should start. The Sarid and Gao 2011 reading stated that these two strains are high-risk types. The high-risk HPV strains are associated with carcinoma of the cervix, vulva, vagina, penis, anus, oral cavity, and oropharynx and tonsils. It is possible that these also cause cancer of the larynx and head and neck cancers. The paper also mentioned that cervical cancer is one of the leading cancers that cause women to die. Since it is so deadly I think we should focus on the other high-risk strains to bring cervical cancer deaths down as well as the other carcinomas. Hopefully, creating a vaccine for these two that can be administered during the same time as other HPV vaccines would be beneficial. I believe this vaccine should be administered at ages 11-12 like the Gardasil shot.
