Study: Benefit to women not enough to sway men to get H...( TALLAHASSEE Fla. -- Informing men th...),Health

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- Informing men that a new vaccine to prevent human papillomavirus (HPV) would also help protect their female partners against developing cervical cancer from the sexually transmitted infection did not increase their interest in getting the vaccine, according to a new Florida State University study.

Mary Gerend, assistant professor of medical humanities and social sciences at the FSU College of Medicine, and Jessica Barley, a 2008 Florida State psychology graduate who based her honors thesis on the study, found that men are no more likely to want the vaccination just because they can help protect their female sexual partners. An HPV vaccine for women has been available since 2006, and a vaccine for men is likely to be approved in the near future.

"You can probably interpret this finding in a number of ways," Gerend said. "Thinking about the benefit to their own health -- protection again rare genital cancers and genital warts -- is all men really need to know; telling them all that extra stuff really isn't going to push them one way or another."

For maximum benefit to public health, both men and women should be vaccinated but little was known about men's interest in the vaccine before Gerend's study, which was published in the journal Sexually Transmitted Diseases. Gerend presented the findings recently at the annual meeting of the Society of Behavioral Medicine in Montreal.

HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which estimates that approximately 20 million Americans are currently infected with HPV and that another 6.2 million people become newly infected each year. HPV-related cancers are very rare in men, but last year the American Cancer Society estimated that nearly 20,000 women would be diagnosed with cervical and other cancers caused by HPV in 2008.

Gerend's research team randomly divided 356 male colle
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