HPV report misleading
I am concerned by a recent article on human papillomavirus (HPV) (“HPV can survive outside body: Kaohsiung doctor,” Oct. 18, page 2).
I expected to read an interesting science-based essay, perhaps a vehicle for raising awareness of the new HPV vaccine available for free to teenage girls in Taiwan. However, it turned out to be a misleading fearmongering description of one individual case.
According to the report, a 50-year-old woman and her daughter — a sixth-grader — were both diagnosed with HPV after the mother developed genital warts. The mother claimed she and her husband were both sexually faithful, and speculated that she caught the virus from a sauna and transmitted it to her daughter via a shared towel.
As any doctor should know, if the symptoms are on the genital area of an adult patient, it is far more likely that the transmission happened through sexual contact. Also, as any human should know, people often lie to spouses and even doctors, to save face or for many other reasons, not to mention that for married people, genital-to-genital contact with a person other than your spouse is still officially illegal in Taiwan.
In Taiwan, gynecologists often do not even try to get honest details about patients’ sexual behavior. They simply treat the disease and give prevention advice. This is understandable when dealing with adult patients, but this case involved a child patient.
Did the doctor interview the child to rule out the possibilities of sexual abuse or incest? If so, he should inform the media that children are actually more susceptible to infection by nonsexual means, so that readers do not suspect something nefarious.
Instead, the article focuses on the doctor’s advice for how to prevent this kind of infection at hot springs and in saunas, and concludes with only one sentence about the vaccine: “The HPV vaccine also lowers the risk of contracting the virus, he said.”
This kind of reporting is likely to make readers unreasonably paranoid about using safe public facilities, and not likely to engender confidence in the vaccine.
In addition, this article gives anybody who has genital warts a convenient doctor-approved excuse: “I must have caught it from a spa.”
If readers get the impression that genital HPV infection from public facilities is also common, they might be less likely to take precautions during sex or inform partners that they are infected. Obviously, this does nothing to benefit sex education.
Finally, this article fails to clearly state this important fact: The strain of HPV that causes genital warts is not the strain that most often causes cervical cancer in women, which is the major health concern surrounding HPV in general.
Cervical cancer, unlike genital warts, can be fatal. Why not make this distinction, and use the opportunity to emphasize that there is a vaccine available that can largely eliminate this worry for Taiwan’s next generation.
Daniel Teitler
New Taipei City
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