It has already been accepted by the medical community that HPV (human papillomavirus virus) can cause some type of cervical cancer in women, but a nee study done in Spain shows that it is also one of the leading causes of penile cancer as well.

Doctors from the Catalan Institute of Oncology in Barcelona are saying that half of the cases of penile cancer are caused by HPV and are recommending that men also get the HPV vaccine. Gardasil is currently a HPV vaccine that is given to girls to help prevent the types of cancers that are caused by the virus. Doctors are saying that Gardasil may also be effective in preventing penile cancer in men as well.

Penile cancer is much rarer than cervical cancer and only affects 1% of adult males in Europe and North America, but has higher rates in parts of Africa and Asia. In the world, there are over 26,000 cases of penile cancer a year.

The doctors studied the cases of the cancer between 1986 and 2008 and found that HPV was responsible for 46.9% of the cases. They were linked to strains 16 and 18, which are two of the main strains that cause cervical cancer and are prevented with the Gardasil vaccine.

The vaccine has been tested on men for preventing lesions from the virus on men, but it appears may also be close to being offered to young men to prevent penile cancer as well. There is already controversy about offering it to young girls and now there may be more if it is now offered to young boys as well.

    

HPV (Human Papillomavirus) causes cervical cancer by a slow process. The disease begins as a sexually transmitted infection. The immune system is capable of dealing with this initial problem, but for some women the virus never completely goes away, and those women are left with cells on the cervix that slowly begin to change from a minor infection to precancerous cells, to full blown cancer. Smoking tends to exacerbate the problem, causing the precancerous and cancerous lesions to progress faster, and some forms of HPV are more aggressive than other types which could explain why some women get more sickly than others.