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Comment by AngryData | Hacker News Reader

Glad to see it, except it is still a sensationalist headline IMO because HPV deaths, and specifically below 30 years old, is already extremely low.

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As mentioned already several times in the comments, there is also a long tail of people who survive but after a grueling and costly treatment that disrupt their lives.

What are the numbers on that post vaccine vs pre vaccine?

“We estimate that since its introduction, HPV vaccination has prevented nearly 200 young women from dying from cervical cancer in England.”

Given that the youngest vaccinated women are ~31 now, we would expect rates in that cohort to remain lower than in prior cohorts. But, crucially, we have to wait for this cohort to age to know for sure.

Treat this as a check-in as part of a 50-year longitudinal study that will keep yielding new data for another 40 years or so. (I don't know if it will be the same actual study, but the data will be there.)

Whether it was low or not, the fact that we've been able to effectively cure a certain kind of cancer with a vaccine is a pretty big deal

My issue with it is a missing "in mice"-style qualifier, but this time it is of the geographical nature. The study is focusing on England: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/news/latest-news/2026/medicine-and-de...

Why does that seem important? The “in mice” one makes sense (such results might not be the same in humans), but is there a reason to think that results achieved here in England couldn’t happen elsewhere?

Basically it's definitely possible that you could get cervical cancer without HPV. There's a scientific disagreement about whether in some populations that's say 5% prevalent while others it's more like 0.1% prevalent, or whether they're more similar, but it clearly can happen. Outside science this can turn into "England is very, very white, so, this is basically only a study of white women" which as you observe isn't much like the mouse studies - humans just aren't that different. There are differences, but they're not big enough to suggest this study might be a "glitch" with no relevance for your population like a mouse study could be.

This didn't even occur to me. The title in the submission is cut short; most outlets including this article includes a "close to zero", "near zero" at the end, which has this overly cheery feeling (at least to me) that we can pat ourselves on the back, it's not just done but done-done, on to the next disease, huzzah. Whereas this whole thing is the result of a systematic nation-wide vaccination program that has been going on for quite a while (2008) and a study looked into its effectiveness and found that yes, this concerted campaign may have moved the needle on that population-level gauge.

It can happen elsewhere but it hasn't happened yet! Or who knows!

> except it is still a sensationalist headline

If you take it in terms of absolute risk rather than relative risk, even though it's very clearly the latter as always, sure.

Sometimes it's not on the writer, but the reader. Important context, sure, but it was plenty clear what was being meant.

The vaccine presumably also protects those getting it when they are older, but the data doesn't show that yet. Still, if it does (as seems reasonable) then the benefit is even larger.

I don’t think one can sensationalise the HPV vaccine enough. Cervical cancer is too common and it’s crazy that a vaccine can greatly reduce it.

If you know any women (which is obviously not a given for HN) then you know multiple women who have had cervical cancer scares or worse.

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