Gardisil Update

The latest Journal of the American Medical Association contains a report showing that a quarter of American women older than 14 carry the sexually-transmitted human papillomavirus virus, but only 3.4 percent carry the strains that may cause cervical cancer. About 70 percent of those infections are the cancer-causing strains that the Merck vaccine Gardisils protects against. Younger women had the highest infection rates, about twice the national average. There are about 3,700 deaths a year from cervical cancer in the U.S., but a quarter million worldwide, most of them in the developing world.