Teenage boys in England will be vaccinated against HPV, health minister Steve Brine has announced.
This comes after a well placed source told The Mail on Sunday, which has long campaigned for the move, last week to expect such an announcement within the next few days.
The NHS will embark on a £20-million-a-year programme to vaccinate all 12 and 13 year old males against the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus (HPV), which causes cervical, oral, throat and anal cancers.
A decade after the jab was made available to girls on the NHS, Scotland and Wales announced they were acting on The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation’s (JCVI) claims that inoculating young male teens is cost effective.
The Department of Health and Social Care initially sparked fears England would not be following suit when it said it was only ‘considering’ the committee’s advice.
Girls have been prioritised due to HPV causing cervical cancer, which kills approximately 1,000 women a year, while around 500 women also die from other HPV-related cancers.
Yet the virus is now known to cause approximately 2,000 male cancers annually, resulting in the deaths of about 650 men a year, mainly from mouth and throat forms of the disease.
HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the US and the UK with an estimated 14 million Americans and a third of British adults being infected every year.
Teenage boys in England will be vaccinated against HPV, health minister announced (stock)
‘As a father to a son, I understand the relief this will bring to parents’
Brine said: ‘The HPV vaccine for girls is already expected to save hundreds of lives every year and I am delighted that we will now be protecting even more people from this devastating disease by extending the vaccines to boys.
‘Any vaccination programme must be firmly grounded in evidence to ensure that we can get the best outcomes for patients, but as a father to a son, I understand the relief that this will bring to parents.
‘We are committed to leading a world class vaccination programme and achieving some of the best cancer outcomes in the world – I am confident these measures today will bring us one step further to achieving this goal.’
Dr Mary Ramsay, head of immunisations at Public Health England, added: ‘I’m pleased that adolescent boys will be offered the HPV vaccine.
‘Almost all women under 25 have had the HPV vaccine and we’re confident that we will see a similarly high uptake in boys.
‘This extended programme offers us the opportunity to make HPV-related diseases a thing of the past and build on the success of the girls’ programme, which has already reduced the prevalence of HPV 16 and 18, the main cancer-causing types, by over 80 per cent.
‘We can now be even more confident that we will reduce cervical and other cancers in both men and women in the future.’
‘This will save lives – no question’
Boys are expected to receive the Gardasil vaccine, as girls do. This protects against two HPV strains that cause cancer and two others that result in genital warts.
Professor Margaret Stanley, incoming president of the International Papillomavirus Society, said: ‘This will save lives – no question.’
Tristan Almada, founder of the NOMAN is an Island: Race to End HPV campaign, added the decision is ‘the biggest opportunity to prevent cancer in decades’.
Although officials have not announced when an HPV vaccination programme will be rolled out for teenage boys, HPV Action believes it is ‘entirely realistic’ for it to begin by September 2019 at the latest.
HPV causes five times as many mouth and throat cancers as thought
The JCVI previously claimed it was ‘overwhelmingly’ unlikely that vaccinating boys would be cost-effective.
Its conclusions were based, in part, on a flawed computer model that wrongly assumed HPV caused relatively few cancers in men.
The body also reasoned the vast majority of young men would be protected as a result of vaccinating girls.
Yet earlier this month the committee accepted new evidence that HPV causes many more cancers in men than previously thought.
In particular, it causes up to five times as many mouth and throat cancers as had been estimated.
At a meeting in June, the JCVI subsequently switched its advice to conclude that vaccinating boys may well be cost-effective, The Mail On Sunday learned. It released a statement confirming this recommendation last week.
Dr David Elliman, a consultant in Community Child Health, said: ‘The decision to role out the HPV vaccine to boys is to be welcomed.
‘The JCVI agreed that it would undoubtedly be of benefit, but were constrained by the rules of cost effectiveness modelling. Now boys will also be able to benefit from the vaccine in the same way that girls have.’