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 would your recommendation be, 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 supportive evidence).
Based on the Sarid and Gao (2011) article, I would tell my colleague that the HPV strains that should be covered in this new treatment are Kaposi’s sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) and Hepatitis B virus (HBV). KSHV is very important to be covered in a new treatment since “among AIDS patients, KSHV infection was shown to precede KS onset.” If KSHV is prevented from proliferating, the patient would be protected from not only KS but also other diseases that AIDS patients with lower immune systems might be susceptible to. When I first read this article, I was worried about how diminished someone’s immune system would become after an infection KSHV. The article states AIDS-related KS cancer instances “occur disproportionately among untreated HIV-positive/KSHV-infected individuals.” To protect immunocompromised people it is essential to cover this strain of infection.
I included Hepatitis B virus (HBV) as a strain that should be covered in the new treatment because this is the only direct strain of the HPV family that directly states WHY this strain is important to cover. The article states “HBV infection is chronic in a large proportion of individuals” and “100-fold more likely to develop HCC than uninfected individuals.” With this information, I believe the portion of people who suffer from HBV as well as the risk of developing HCC (not defined in the HBV section from what I can see) are at a much higher risk than the statistics for the other strains within this family.
I do not believe this article gave enough information for me to comprehensively create a treatment plan since there could be multiple unseen factors that are not included in this paper that could be affecting the patient. On many of these viral descriptions, I do not believe the article gave sufficient evidence for why the strains listed were important enough to be researched more. A majority of the information was a history of the strain which I did not believe was applicable to this assignment.
