For some opponents of the HPV vaccination, the line of thinking goes like this: Give young women a shot to protect them from certain strands of the most common sexually transmitted disease, and you give them license to throw all coital caution out the window. But according to a new study, this doesn’t seem to be the case.
Published this month in JAMA Internal Medicine, the research looked at insurance claims of about 20,000 12- to 18-year-old girls who received the shot and over 100,000 12- to 18-year-old girls who hadn’t over a five-year period to compare the rates of STD infections. The researchers found that there was no association between the HPV vaccination and higher incidences of STDs. Meaning: Getting the vaccine didn’t lead teens to have any more risky sex than they were having before.
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According to the CDC, over 4,000 women died from cervical cancer in 2011. While it may not be “unreasonable” to be worried about the potential negative consequences of the HPV vaccine, Jena said that he hopes his new study can assure people that the concerns they might have are most likely going to be outweighed by the benefits.
