I am fully aware that the treatment plan would remain the same regardless of the etiology but a persons understanding of the cause of their disease is of importance if you are one of the 3%. A statement saying this vaccine would cure 100% of cervical cancers is simply not true if it is indeed 97%. Its like dismissing the other 3%. This conversation might be of importance to you if you were the patient. What if there were further studies to show a genetic cause for the unknown miniscule 3%, would this not be of importance to the patients daughter?

Debbie Saslow, PhD, director of breast and cervical cancer for the American Cancer Society (ACS), said, "HPV is NECESSARY but not sufficient to cause cervical cancer. We don't know why some women with HPV infections get cancer or precancers and others don't, but it makes sense that genetics account for some of this. (No kidding this is true of all cancers.) Some people smoke their whole life and never get cancer others get it at a young age. The difference is some type of genetic protection or predisposition that is unknown. It always boils down to genetics in the final anaysis.

What this means is that HPV is still a required component, and the genetic predisposition is to be suseptible to having the HPV virus run all the way to malignancy. More genetic predisposition is not known. This was also recently reported in the Journal Nature this year with a huge retrospective population considered. Please note also:

Au WW, Sierra-Torres CH, Tyring SK.
Predisposition of cervical cancers. Department of Preventive Medicine and Community Health, The University of Texas

"Infection with high-risk human papilloma virus (HPV) is a NECESSARY RISK FACTOR for the development of cervical cancer (CC). However, there are many factors that contribute to the development of CC." (What is being referred to here if you read the entire paper is genetic suseptibility to the body's inability to shed the virus in some individuals.)

Since there is no protection currently to avoid HPV except the new vaccine, my point is that if you want to side step cervical cancer you have to side step HPV.

Your point that it would be important to her prodgeny, is only as we understand this now, to seeing that she got vaccinated so that IF she was exposed to HPV, it would not run a course all the way to malignancy.

"What if"? This is becoming a dialog of hypotheticals, and opinions rather than facts, for which you and I can agree to disagree since I'm too short on time to go back and forth on it any longer. By the way you miss quoted me, I never said that the vaccine would "cure " anyone. It prevents HPV 16/18 from taking hold of you. The point was that we have finally had a major breakthrough in cancer. We have not had something like this happen in my lifetime. It's a positive note, and will have collateral positive effects in the oral, head and neck cancer arena in the neck decade. There are not many things in the world of cancer, let alone medicine in general, that are 99.7% effective. You want to make an argument about that missing micro piece WHICH MAY BE A STATISTICAL ANOMOLY AND NOT RELATED TO CLINICAL FACT fine with me...please keep your positions and opinions. I'm done -I'll let you have the last say on this one, you've made your position very clear.

Brian, I am new to this site and my husband just completed treatments for stage IV SCC with the tonsil as a primary. He never smoked a day in his life. We are also following the HPV deal. His doctor at UVa talked a little about it. How close are they coming to linking it to oral cancers? If close, could it help those already with SCC? I've also read a lot on protein inhibitors that slow down or prevent growth of blood vessels to a tumor. For ex, black raspberries supposed to be great for this cause. Do you find any stock in this? You seem to be extremely well-versed in research goings-on and I am truly grateful to have run across this site. My husband (Jon) and I had our first child during his treatments (he's 36) and we're trying to gain as much knowledge as possible about his disease and how close researchers are to preventing or CURING it. When we saw the first commercials about HPV we about fell out in the floor!!! We're so happy that the word is getting out!

Ann

The link is established and there are lots of articles in the news section and throughout the site about it. Just use the search engine on the main site to pull them up. The next scientific generation of the vaccine science will be looking at attacking the virus in older individuals not as a preventative vaccine in children. Angiogenesis inhibitors are being studied and are in clinical trials. It will be a few more years before we know if they are going to be a major factor in halting the growth of oral cancer tumors. The berry connection is real; just remember after reading the many articles in the news section of the web site that we do not know what chemical compounds in the berries are the most important and effective. Again very promising stuff, but years ways from practical application. Curing oral cancer will happen as we find cures for other cancers as they are all related at the genetic level. Targeted therapies such as Erbitux etc. are showing the most promise and at some point in the future they may even be able to, using your own DNA profile, create a custom cocktail that works just for you. But we will never prevent cancers from occurring in our world. The best hope is that it will become a manageable and survivable disease with maintenance. The things that cause cancers are all around us in the air we breathe, the foods we eat, our water sources and more. Management rather than cure is the current goal. There is information about all these things on the main web site and I urge you to spend some time wandering through it.