Yo! Youth OutLook

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San Francisco State University’s student health center is glowing from natural sunlight. The wooden display case of medical information allows you to take home any pamphlet on a variety of health subjects. Before you even hit the student help desk, information on sexually transmitted diseases ranging from Chlamydia to HIV are common and are interspersed in between other skinny pamphlets that chat about vaginitis and how to cure it. But hiding in the racks is a minty green pamphlet that gives information about HPV, a virus that is expected to infect over 20 million people this year.

The Human Papilloma Virus rolls off the tongue funny and sounds foreign to many ears, but approximately 6.2 million Americans get a new genital HPV infection each year, 30 of the 100 strains can affect your reproductive system, which is easily passed through skin to skin contact, most commonly through sexual activity. Condoms are not going to save you from this virus. They simply do not cover enough skin to prevent the spread of HPV, which can live on your skin all the way down to your thighs.

Merck, the drug company that once brought you the arthritis painkiller Vioxx, is now the company to help curb the spread of HPV with their vaccine, Gardasil. Approved in the summer of 2006 by the Drug and Food Administration and recommended by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), Gardasil is the official vaccine being offered to girls and women ages 9-26 through a series of three shots during a six-month period. The vaccine protects against four HPV strains, the ones that lead to 70 percent of cervical cancers and 90 percent of genital warts. Gardasil actually prevents the spread of HPV, according to studies done by manufacturer Merck. HPV may be a new medical term to your ears, but there are plenty of women who have kept their status a secret or have it, but don’t know.

Julie Jay is currently studying the HPV epidemic in the well-kept room of 46 with the UCSF study team that has existed for over 12 years at SF State’s health center. Her long hair moves slightly as she quickly picks up the phone to ask a volunteer a question about lubricants used during sex. They are the research group that hangs flyers for volunteer subjects in the school bathrooms. They interview and follow women who have various strains of HPV as well as those who do not.

The virus isn’t necessarily gender specific. Men are carriers as well. Jay, a nurse practitioner, explains: “Women have a more delicate system. Their main reproductive parts are inside.”

HPV pamphlets recite that having sex at an earlier age can increase your chances of contracting HPV. “This is because women have skin inside of their vagina that changes, the process called metaplasia,” Jay explains. “The skin near a woman’s cervix changes from columnar epithelium to squamocolumnar junction,” Jay explains as she quickly draws a vagina. This means the bumpy skin inside the vagina alters itself into a smoother version during the transitional post-pubertal years in a woman. When HPV is present during this change, the virus has an opportunity to alter the cell’s DNA, which can then lead to cancerous cells.

Preteens may seem a bit young to require a vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease, but one has to look past the moral issues and realize the health issues involved. People are having sex at a variety of paces, which makes it crucial to administer the vaccine before any sexual contact begins.

Friendly nurse practitioner Danamaya Gorharm sees many youth patients at the Daly City Youth Health Center. “We’ve stopped doing PAP smears entirely until someone has been sexually active for three years because you’ll just chase a whole bunch of abnormals that will turn normal again. What you want to do is make sure you find the ones (cells) that are not going to change and are slowly going to get worse.” Through the years, she has observed that the cervix tends to clear itself within a period of eight months.

Men are able to contract and pass HPV without symptoms. Approximately 1 percent of sexually active men have the virus at one point in their life, but they aren’t being pushed as much as women to get tested for HPV because penile and anal cancers are rare. There are limited ways to test for the virus in males. Genital warts are a sure sign that someone has a strain of HPV and can be found on the penis or anal area, which may be raised, flat, or cauliflower shaped.

San Francisco State is currently pushing to have access to the vaccine, but the price is costly with the complete vaccination series costing approximately $360 per woman. Colleges, like Penn State and Cal State Northridge, already have the recommended vaccine in stock and available.

The vaccine doesn’t help women who already have HPV, but it will help to prevent contracting the strains that you do not have. Women already diagnosed with HPV are not always recommended to get the vaccine.

Cosmo’s September issue has 101 sex tips along with awareness postcards to tear out asking you to, “tell a friend,” in an advertising campaign by Merck, which has an opportunity to make millions off of every female in the United States. They won’t be the only company with an HPV vaccine though. Cervarix, created by GlaxoSmithKline, is in the works of being approved by the end of 2006.

California is currently in the process of requiring insurers to cover testing for HPV during cervical cancer screening, fourth in line with Maryland, New Mexico, Texas and West Virginia.
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