Limited gains in teen HPV vaccination rates

The CDC has released two new reports that show how much room for improvement there is in the HPV vaccination rate, and just how many cancer cases the virus is still causing. In the first report, which looked at teenage vaccine rates, federal researchers found that the rate of adolescents up to date on the HPV vaccine series increased from 48.6% in 2017 to 51.1% in 2018, a bump driven only by boys. Rates were higher among teens whose clinician recommended the vaccine. In the second report, on HPV-attributable cancers, researchers found that an estimated 34,800 cases of HPV-caused cancer happen each year in the United States, 92% of which are tied to the strain of the virus that the vaccine protects against.