OTTAWA — The federal government is recommending men and boys be vaccinated against the human papilloma virus — adding to recommendations already in place that young girls and women be vaccinated.
HPV is a sexually transmitted infection that causes genital warts as well as anal cancer in men and the majority of cervical cancers in women. A study released in February's New England Journal of Medicine showed the HPV vaccine also was effective in preventing genital warts in males.
The NACI recommends males between the ages of nine and 26 be vaccinated with Gardasil.
The vaccine is primarily to prevent further transmission of HPV. According to Dr. James Dickinson, a professor in the University of Calgary faculty of medicine and cervical cancer researcher, it is primarily transferred by men from woman to woman.
"It's only fairly recently that we fully understood that this is how it's transmitted," Dickinson said Wednesday. "We realized that an immunization could prevent this transmission."
However, researchers don't yet know how effective the vaccine will be at reducing cancer rates.
"We still don't fully understand how long this immunization will work and we don't fully know yet how effective it is," he said. "We have to do it on the basis of hope, because by the time we fully know the answer of how effective this is, it'll be another 30 years."
According to Dickinson, women first become exposed to the infection when they become sexually active, but cervical cancer generally doesn't appear until they reach their 40s or 50s. A similar timeline is thought to exist for anal cancer in men.
He also said that it's unknown at this point how long the vaccine will actually last.
Dickinson offered a caveat to widespread vaccinations.
While a vaccine for tetanus is costs only about $1 per shot, Gardasil costs upwards of $100 — and requires three shots.
"This vaccine is to prevent diseases that are much less common," he said. "The vast majority of people who get this vaccine will not benefit because they would never have got the disease. The trouble is we don't know which ones."
He said there were hard choices ahead for the provinces to decide whether to cover the costs of Gardasil for the wider population. He said the costs had to be weighed against the devastating consequences of cancer.
Health Canada approved Gardasil for female vaccination in 2006, paving the way for some provinces — Quebec, Alberta, Ontario and British Columbia — to begin vaccination programs for girls in Grades 4 through 9.
Dr. Franziska Baltzer, head of adolescent medicine at the Montreal Children's Hospital and spokeswoman for the Canadian Association of Adolescent Health said the CAAH was supportive of the expansion of HPV vaccinations.
"Both genders contribute to the spread of HPV and develop diseases as a result of HPV infection. To eliminate those diseases, we need to vaccinate males as well as females," Baltzer said in a news release.
Health Canada first approved the HPV vaccine for use in males in February 2010. However, none of the provinces has implemented a vaccination program similar to the one for females prior to the NACI recommendation.