Ceravix Good For 6+ Years

[joreth]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/6709709/Vaccine-against-cervical-cancer-protects-for-at-least-six-years.html

Almost 6 and a half years ago, scientists injected a whole bunch of girls with the HPV vaccine, Ceravix. Now, 6.4 years later, every single one of those girls was 100% protected against HPV.

They also checked to see how many girls got sick. 8% of the girls who got vaccinated had un-related health problems following their vaccination. 10% of the girls who got the placebo had health problems following their placebo injection.

All the data points towards the vaccine's continued efficacy.

Once again, the vaccine is proved safe and effective. If we are to blame the vaccine for those 8% of girls who had unrelated health problems, then we have to blame sugar water for making 10% of the other group sick too.

Comments

[nasu-dengaku.livejournal.com]

The study only says they were protected against strains 16 and 18. This is of course a great improvement given that 16 and 18 cause most cancer cases, but I'd be interested in how much additional protection it provided against other strains.

[joreth]

Ceravix, I believe, protects against the same 4 strains that Gardasil does, plus a few more that they didn't intend, it just happens to work that way. But those details came out in some other study that I don't have my hands on at the moment.

This one was studying *just* the longevity of those two strains ... have to narrow down the criteria or risk the study being contaminated by too many elements :-)

[summer-jackel.livejournal.com]

srsly want to get one of these the next time I have a spare 500. Stupid lack of health care.

[joreth]

Yes, the poor healthcare in this country pisses me off. Unfortunately, having health insurance probably wouldn't help me to get the vaccine, since it's only FDA approved for under age 24, so even with insurance, I'd still have to get it off-label (which usually means, out of pocket, but not always).

[leora.livejournal.com]

Sugar water is dangerous stuff. I could do serious harm to a diabetic I know if I had some.

On a side note, I actually do wonder what they construct the placebos out of. I know the mention is usually of sugar pills, but I'd think for an injection saline would make more sense. And it would avoid the you're diabetic and I just threw off your expectations for how much insulin you need issue.

[joreth]

I don't actually know what the placebo was, either this one or any of them, I just said "sugar water" as a synomym for placebo, even though that's probably not what they use, just because it's such a common synomym.

Or maybe they do use sugar water and they don't allow diabetics in the studies? I don't know.

[leora.livejournal.com]

It's possible they don't. They do often want to look at things in isolation, without complicating factors. On the other hand, for something like does this cause side effects, they need a more representative sample that includes people with medical issues, since they need to know if it will cause complications for people with various health problems.

It's an interesting issue I've been thinking about lately. Lao-Tzu is both diabetic and has lymphoma. We can only get stats or info about each condition separately. This makes sense, because when you're studying lymphoma, you don't want to complicate it. And they simply cannot do research on every combination of health problems possible. But when treating an individual with multiple conditions, well, then you do care. They do interact and affect each other. I wish I did have info about the best care for combinations of problems. But each combination is so much less likely that it's just not really worth prioritizing for study. In Lao-Tzu's case, I think the treatment is fairly clear and the main challenge for the vet is figuring out the right dosages given that one of the meds interferes with the effectiveness of another of the meds. But you can get interesting cases where the correct course is really, really unclear.

No real solution for it. We'd need to have our society be much wealthier and able to dedicate a lot more money to scientific research to start researching problematic combinations of diseases. But maybe we'll slowly build up info on that.

Not really the point, as I don't actually think the placebo was likely to cause any problems beyond those caused by being jabbed with a needle. But I do sometimes wonder about the details. It's not easy to construct a good study, and when you're actually doing so, you do need to think about what works as a good placebo.

I think it's easier for injectables though than for pills, since nobody will taste or smell it generally. You really can't tell what is being injected into you. You do need to match for color, but that should be really easy.

[leora.livejournal.com]

I'm a bit of an experimental design geek.