UHS to provide new HPV vaccine

In a move mirroring health trends nationwide, University Health Services (UHS) will soon make the newly released human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination available to Princeton students.

"We wanted to wait until we had the vaccine in hand before we put it on our website, but we expect to have it available sometime later this week," UHS physician Peter Johnsen said.

The vaccine protects against the sexually transmitted disease HPV, which has been linked to the development of cervical cancer in women. Despite concerns by some pro-abstinence groups that the drug will encourage sexual promiscuity, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently licensed this vaccine for use in girls and women between the ages of nine and 26. It is administered in three doses over the course of six months.

Currently, receiving the vaccine comes at a steep price, largely because insurance companies have not yet begun to cover it. UHS will charge $134 per dose, costing students just over $400 to be protected against HPV.

Johnsen said this fee is only slightly above the list price of the vaccination, making UHS' prices comparable or even lower than those of private practices, which must tack on more administrative costs.

"One reason we haven't pushed the vaccine is because we think in the next couple of months insurance companies will start to cover the costs, so we're just waiting to see how this plays out," Johnsen said. It may just "be a question of time," he added.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) predicts that insurance companies will get on board when the American Academy of Pediatrics makes an official statement on the HPV vaccine in December. UHS is currently negotiating with the Student Health Plan over coverage of the vaccine.

Besides the large expense, there has been little controversy in the University community surrounding a vaccine that many consider to be a positive development in women's health.

"I think [the vaccine] is really exciting, one of the biggest medical breakthroughs in the last 10 years," Fannie Bialek '09, who has worked in sexual health education since she was 15, said. "This is going to help with increasing awareness of HPV and hopefully decreasing the occurrence of the virus in the population."

HPV is a particularly serious STD, Bialek said, because infected males often do not know they are carrying the disease.

"It's a lot scarier than many of the STDs. You don't have a good way of protecting yourself from it because you don't know who has it," she said.

Students were largely unconcerned by the controversy over whether the drug promotes unsafe sex.

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The Anscombe Society, a group on campus that promotes abstinence before marriage, has not taken an official stance on the issue, but Anscombe President Sherif Girgis '08 said he supports the HPV vaccine.

"Not as Anscombe's president but only personally, I find limiting HPV's occurrence wonderful even if I consider the extramarital sex which often spreads it wrong," Girgis said in an email. "The vaccine's use is, in principle, reconcilable with the norms of chastity I espouse — after all, HPV could spread between spouses or by sexual harassment, in neither of which the virus' contractor flouts chastity, and any increase in promiscuity caused by the vaccine's administration I'd consider an undesirable but tolerable side-effect."

How many women at Princeton will be interested in receiving the newly available vaccine is unknown, but Johnsen predicts that in time, the HPV vaccine will become "fairly standard."

"It seems like a safe and effective vaccine that has a significant potential benefit for recipients," he said.