You Call that a Cancer Vaccine?

National news headlines this week have been abuzz with headlines trumpeting a "cervical cancer vaccine." But is it really a vaccine against cervical cancer? No, it's not. I believe drug companies billed the drug as a cancer vaccine for marketing purposes and the press took the bait.

Headlines from Los Angeles to India duped readers like me into thinking a vaccine against cancer had been discovered. "FDA Urged to Approve Cervical Cancer Vaccine," read the LA Times. A headline in India's The Hindu proclaimed, "Cervical cancer vaccine 'will protect older women too.'" But if you actually read the stories you'll find that this vaccine doesn't protect against cervical cancer, but a sexually transmitted nasty called the human papilloma virus or HPV.

True, HPV is responsible for 70 percent of the 15,000 annual cases of cervical cancer diagnosed in the U.S. each year (it kills 4,000 and is the second-leading cause of cancer deaths among women), according to the LA Times report. But the LA Times also reveals that HPV is responsible for 50 percent of genital wart cases as well.

So why don't headlines say, "FDA Urged to Approve Genital Wart Vaccine," or "Sexually Transmitted Disease Vaccine 'will protect older women too?'"

It's all marketing, folks.

The advertising wizards at drug companies Merck and GlaxoSmithKline probably anticipated the lukewarm response to a vaccine that protects against genital warts; and they were brilliant enough to know that social conservatives would fight tooth-and-nail to scuttle any drug that made sex any safer than it already is.

Does that sound ridiculous? Well, here's the lead from a Washington Post article published last October, "A new vaccine that protects against cervical cancer has set up a clash between health advocates who want to use the shots aggressively to prevent thousands of malignancies and social conservatives who say immunizing teenagers could encourage sexual activity."

No, calling the drug a cancer vaccine wasn't enough to avoid the controversy all together, but it's probably enough to build a critical mass of public support to get the drug approved. And maybe, just maybe, to the chagrin of social conservatives, this vaccine could become mandatory. Billed as a vaccine against cancer, how can it loose?

For the record, the only news source I found with an accurate title online was NPR. At their website, a story on the vaccine had a headline that read, "FDA to Review Vaccine for Cancer-Causing Virus."