I am so happy right now I could burst! You know Gardisil, the vaccine that helps prevent four known types of virus that lead to HPV? Well according to Consumer Reports, it’s finally been approved for male use! Oh, and this morning I found out a new vaccine has been approved for female use too!

According to U.S. News, Cervarix has been approved for women 10-25. Cervarix doesn’t protect against the two strains of HPV that cause genital warts that Gardisil does, but it does protect against one more strain of HPV that leads to possibly cancerous lesions on the cervix than Gardisil does.

Why am I giddy with joy? Well, because HPV can cause warts (unsightly) and cancer (potentially life threatening), and women can only really be tested for it after it enters a ‘visible’ state (abnormal pap smears and warts) but HPV doesn’t always have visible symptoms in men and there’s no approved male test. So, just like back when unwanted pregnancies were just the woman’s problem, so was finding, treating and dealing with the potentially life threatening fallout from HPV. Really fair, huh?

Statisitically, something between 50% and 75% of all sexually active people supposedly have or will have HPV in their lifetime. In fact, HPV can sit in one’s system without being detected for years before anyone notices something weird on a pap smear, and can therefore be transmitted without even knowing they have it. Oh, and did I mention that condoms aren’t full protection against HPV, which can be spread by contact with the area around the genitals that isn’t covered by a condom?

So basically ladies, all those ‘safer’ sex options like asking your male partner if they’d been tested recently for everything and using a condom? How about waiting for monogamy with a particular partner (who isn’t a virgin) before deciding to ditch this or that preventative measure? Yeah, they don’t protect you completely from HPV and all its lovely cancerous possibilities. But now men can get a vaccine that hopefully (if applied prior to the advent of their sexual hijinks) will keep them from getting or spreading this ‘invisible’ menace. Yay! Of course this does mean that most of the men in my generation are still suspect, but thankfully I like ‘em young anyway.

Now we just need to get that HIV vaccine finished up and all the ‘invisible’ menaces will be taken care of. Of course guys practicing safer sex and getting tested regularly should at least know if/when they have HIV and be honest when you ask them about it. When they aren’t, you can apparently have someone’s who is knowingly spreading HIV incarcerated, as the amazing women in the above video demonstrated with one philandering scuzz bucket.

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