23/01/2019
A difundir
North American HPV Awareness Week
Members of American Medical Women’s Association (AMWA), the Global Initiative Against HPV & Cervical Cancer, the American Head & Neck Society (AHNS), The American Cancer Society, and the World Health Organization have collaborated to present the first North American HPV Awareness Week, January 22-28, 2019. The goal of the initiative is to increase public and practitioner awareness of HPV, HPV-related diseases, and the importance of HPV vaccination. As a partner to AMWA this week, OCF is hoping that our followers here will listen into some of the webinars being presented. For those in the oral and oropharyngeal cancer community the most important day will be Thursday January 24, when the webinar will cover oropharyngeal cancers.
Please visit this web page on the Oral Cancer Foundation web site to see the entire schedule of webinars. https://oralcancerfoundation.org/understanding/hpv/hpv-awareness-week/
The foundation has a long history working in the area of HPV. Our earliest relationship with Dr. Maura Gillison which started when her original peer reviewed publication linked HPV to oropharyngeal cancers for the first time, and the many years of co funding her research into it, has kept us engaged in elucidating the many facets of this cancer and the virus. After the HPV vaccine was introduced and FDA approved in 2006, we worked for three years to convince the CDC that boys should be vaccinated as well. Even if the argument was only about cervical cancer, we were able to convince them that gender-based vaccination was not the best way to reach herd immunity, as men are vectors of the virus to women. The existing system was only dealing with half the problem. Partnering with the only other non-profit to join us, our friends at the HPV and A**l Cancer Foundation, and in the last year the American Academy of Pediatrics, we finally prevailed, and it was no longer an “off-label” use of the vaccine if it was given to boys. Many HPV research papers have followed over the years. The most recent research reveals genomic changes that are found in those individuals that do not mount an immune response, and gives us both targets for future therapeutic treatments, and potential targets for determining prior to malignant cascade, who might be a candidate for that to occur in. Those individuals could be on an accelerated screening program to watch for the earliest signs of the disease. The ramifications of this are profound as this baseline data becomes the beginning of these new ideas. Remember that 630,000 people in the world get an HPV origin cancer every year.