ACTION NEEDED!

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR NEEDED TO SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT ON NEW HPV INFECTION RATES

Merck may have abandoned its lobbying efforts for its HPV vaccine, Gardasil, but the propaganda machine is still cranking along at high speed.

The latest is a study published in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) that claims that the number of women infected with HPV is much higher than previously thought.

And while those numbers may be surprising, they are not the cause for alarm that Merck would like you to believe.

The story has been widely reported by the news media this week, but they haven�t been telling the whole story. Most of them report, correctly, that the study found that more than one-fourth of the subjects were infected with an HPV of some type.

If you only see the 25% figure, you might think one-fourth of all women are cervical cancer-bombs waiting to explode.

But what most stories are leaving out is that the same study finds that only about 2 percent of the subjects were infected with the types that are high-risk to develop into cancer.

And that only 3.4 percent were infected with the types that are targeted by the HPV vaccine.

Another conclusion of the story isn�t getting reported either � that age, marital status and the number of sexual partners are the most important risk factors.

The study also explains that �Although HPV infection is common, studies suggest approximately 90% of infections clear within 2 years.�

Let�s put the total numbers in perspective: Last year there were 9,700 new cases of cervical cancer, and 3,700 deaths. Experts say that 85% of those deaths could have been prevented with regular Pap smears. So perhaps an additional 550 deaths might have been prevented because of the vaccine.

But here are the actual infection rates reported, straight from the JAMA story: