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HPV, the human papillomavirus, is a sexually transmitted infection (STI) that can lead to cervical cancer and genital warts. Recently in the news, since Hollywood actor Michael Douglas mentioned that oral sex can lead to HPV, which could cause mouth and throat cancers, HPV has gotten a lot of attention. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) just announced that the prevalence of HPV in young teenage girls have decreased by 56 percent. Increased awareness about this virus could potentially lead to more vaccinations, lowering the rate even more.

In this report, researchers used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. With this information, the research team compared the rates of HPV in females from the ages of 14 to 59 before and after the introduction of the vaccination program, which started in 2006. The researchers found that for the age group of 14 to 19, the prevalence rate lowered by over 50 percent in 2007 to 2010 when compared to the rates in 2003 to 2006. Despite the lowered rate, researchers stressed that the overall vaccination rates are still very low in comparison to other countries.

According to the CDC, nearly 79 million Americans with the majority of them being in their late teens or early 20s have been infected with HPV. Nearly 14 million people get infected every year with around 19,000 women and 8,000 men developing cancers due to the infection. The director of the CDC, Thomas Frieden stated that only one-third of girls between the ages of 13 and 17 get the full course of the vaccine, which is three shots spread out between months. Around 46 percent of girls receive a single dose. The CDC recommends all girls from 11 to 12 to get vaccinated.

"Our low vaccination rates represent 50,000 preventable tragedies: 50,000 girls alive today will develop cervical cancer over their lifetime that would have been prevented if we reached 80% vaccination rates," Frieden said according to USA Today. "For every year we delay in doing so, another 4,400 girls will develop cervical cancer in their lifetimes."

Debbi Saslow, the director of breast and gynecologic cancer with the American Cancer Society in Atlanta, GA stated that the low rate of vaccinations could be attributed to the fact that some physicians and parents do not want to discuss sex at such a young age.

"Some doctors don't go out of the way to recommend it because they want to avoid talking about sex or they think the parents want to avoid talking about sex," she said. "It's not called the 'cervical cancer prevention vaccine.' Maybe it should be."

The report was published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.