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Comment by duffpkg | Hacker News Reader

This article headline is a gross abuse of the conclusions of the actual study which is here: https://www.eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.E...

This site is full of people perfectly capable of reading most studies. I would much rather see these links go to studies than endless clickbait articles about studies.

The conclusion of the study show that about 30% of the women in the study from 2017-2014 tested positive for one of several types of HPV infection. This does appear to be a reduction from an earlier 2013 study but the earlier study was by different authors with different methodology so gauging the scale of the reduction is not straightforward. My opinion is that a safe conclusion of the study is that HPV prevalence has not increased.

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That link says:

> What have we learnt from this study?

> Infection with HPV types covered by the vaccine (HPV16/18) has been almost eliminated. Before vaccination, the prevalence of HPV16/18 was between 15–17%, which has decreased in vaccinated women to < 1% by 2021. However, about one-third of women still had HPV infection with non-vaccine high-risk HPV types, and new infections with these types were more frequent in vaccinated than in unvaccinated women.

The conclusion seems to be that the vaccine is extremely effective at preventing infection by the strains included in the vaccine. One might reach a stretch conclusion and infer that the 9-valent vaccine would be even better as it would (probably) dramatically reduce the risk of several of the remaining “high-risk” variants.

The study is linked early in the article and is fairly dense, the article summarized it well and is a lot more readable.

16/18 are the most carcinogenic strains, they have been close to eradicated in Denmark. "Denmark close to wiping out leading cancer-causing HPV strains after vaccine roll-out" is the full headline and 100% accurate.

Those were the only two high risk strains covered by the vaccine used in the time frame studied. The study covers the first cohort of girls given the 2008 version of the vaccine when they recently reached age to start screening. It is expected to not see other strains affected in this study, even though current vaccines are broader. The total number of high risk HPV cases in the study went down post-vaccination.

The notion of numbered strains of HPV is about diverging lineages going back hundreds of thousands of years in a highly conserved, slowly mutating virus. They are not comparable to things like seasonal COVID or flu strains.

> about 30% of the women in the study from 2017-2014 tested positive for one of several types of HPV infection.

That number was referring to different strains not covered by the vaccine. The study says the rate of infection dropped to less than 1% among those strains the vaccine protects against.

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