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The estimated number of deaths from cervical cancer in the US in 2026 is 4,200. The death rate is 2.2 per 100,000 people down from 3.1 per 100,000 in 1992.

If we multiply 3.1e-5 by 50 years that's about a 0.15% chance of dying of this cancer. The HPV shots cost $500-1000 for the three shots, so the cost per life saved is about $650K. With the statistical value of a human life being about $12M this is quite cost effective.

I'm assuming the reduction in death continues to later in life after 30, but that's a reasonable assumption, IMO.

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Gigachad 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Even if you just consider all of those 4000 + survivors would have got treatment for the cancer after getting it which costs far more than a vaccine.

	▲	cma 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yep and significantly more than the death count would have needed expensive treatment and be out of the workforce for a time or permanently. Also the charged price isn't real cost to the economy. If they have a big margin on it after fixed research/approval expenses lots of it feeds back into the economy through taxes and dividends/reinvestment in other drug development. Beyond death, it can also cause sterility and people may end up with extremely expensive IVF surrogacy pregnancies etc.

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JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> From what risk level without them?

“Approximately 0.6 percent of women will be diagnosed with cervical cancer at some point during their lifetime, based on 2021–2023 data” [1].

Given “reports of serious health issues after HPV vaccination were consistently rare—around 1.8 per 100,000 HPV vaccine doses, or 0.0018%” [2], a woman suffers a 300x higher hazard (assuming we measure a serious vaccine reaction as being equivalent to cancer, which is silly) from going unvaccinated.

> How many people actually die of cervical cancer before age 30?

4,462 young women under the age of 30 died of cervical cancer in 2022 worldwide [3].

[1] https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/cervix.html

[2] https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2021...

[3] https://gco.iarc.who.int/today/en/dataviz/pie?mode=populatio... Mortality, cervix uteri, females, 0 to 29

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moralestapia 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Thanks for the data.

4,462 out of the whole population (of women etc.).

Would you subjectively describe that number as "almost zero"?

	▲	JumpCrisscross 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Would you subjectively describe that number as "almost zero"? Sure. If the only effect were on under-30s, this wouldn’t be a great vaccine. What 5,000 people is good for, however, is confidently measuring decline in a cohort. Zero deaths, even against a baseline of tens, strongly implies this should cross into the tend or hundreds of thousands over the next decades in populations that keep vaccination rates up.

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Arodex 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[flagged]

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apparent 3 hours ago | parent [-]

So 5 deaths across 3 years? Doesn't seem worth a headline, especially since it could literally just be noise in the data.

Also, no need to post snarkily about LMGTFY. TFA should have included the base rate, and the fact that it didn't signals that it's not much of a reduction. It also signals that the journalist who wrote it is more in it for clicks than conveying accurate information.

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bonsai_spool 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Absolutely is - this is such a no-brainer of a public health intervention. We're not touching on the cost of treatment (including inability to have future children! very much something a State should be interested in avoiding).

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Arodex 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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apparent 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The linked chart shows that there were none in the 20-24 age range during the during the recent few years. Is the entire population vaccinated? If not (the article doesn't claim this), then the fact that no one in that age range died (and only 5 in the entire under-30 cohort) tends to indicate that it was not a very high base rate.

Are there other sources that show data going back to the 1970s? Probably! I didn't go searching for them. I looked at what was linked above and saw there were very few. As I said, the Guardian journalist didn't include a base rate, which surely would have been included if it bolstered the argument.

EDIT: I just scrolled down further and saw that even the chart that shows trends over time (which I hadn't seen before, having stopped scrolling earlier) doesn't support your point. It shows there were roughly .2 deaths per year per 100k. Not having any deaths in 20-24 for 3 years is not a statistically significant difference, I would imagine, than the .2 figure. Also, there are undoubtedly other cancer-related advances that have made it less likely that a young woman would die of any kind of cancer.

And the data regarding under-30 deaths is muddled because the next bucket up is 25-34, and we don't know what it is up to 29.

Lastly, at the bottom there's this disclaimer, which makes it even harder to tell what's going on with small numbers:

> Note: Non-zero counts of 5 or less are suppressed and presented as 5.

If you have another source, please feel free to share. What we've seen so far (nothing in TFA, nothing of import in the commenter's linked data) isn't remotely compelling.

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Arodex 3 hours ago | parent [-]

[flagged]

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apparent 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Your source doesn't say what you think it says, as evidenced by your other mistaken comments in this thread. I was referring to other sources (other than the one you posted, which doesn't say what you think it does) because I wanted to know if anything supported your claims.

Please stop with the ad hominem business, which is frowned upon by the HN guidelines (I see you're new here).

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Arodex 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I see you didn't go down the page to "trends by age".

It is not ad hominem to point out you don't search and you don't understand.

	▲	tomhow an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> You are not a serious person. Please stop being noise. This is specifically against the guidelines, notably these lines: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." Please stop registering accounts to break the guidelines with. You know what is expected here.

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comrade1234 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Your questions are sort-of answered in the article. 3300 die each year of cervical cancer in the uk. So at 0% it saves 3300 lives per year. However the vaccination is fairly new so they have to wait longer to see if it applies 20-years, 30-years, etc later. I assume it would though.

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lithocarpus 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Parent's question isn't answered in the article - no figure is given for how many deaths under 30 there are as a baseline.

From the article:

“We estimate that since its introduction [in 2008], HPV vaccination has prevented nearly 200 young women from dying from cervical cancer in England.”

This is an estimate of 200 total of any age total across 18 years. The article doesn't say 3300 die each year, 3300 are diagnosed each year.

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estebank 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The BBC article had that more comparable information: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c621z28z138o

> Between 2020 and 2024, no cervical cancer deaths were recorded in women aged 20 to 24 - the first time that had happened over a five-year period.

> Without vaccination, around 23 deaths would have been expected.

Note the first chart in the link showing the historical trend for the 20-24 cohort since 2000 plumetting from 25 to 0.

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apparent 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Out of curiosity, have there been any other advances in medicine that would make it less likely that women would die from cervical cancer before hitting 30? I don't keep up on oncology developments, but I assume that this particular shot is not the only thing that has reduced cervical cancer deaths in women under 30. If they were looking at rates of acquiring cancer, that would be more focused on this intervention.

	▲	estebank 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not a doctor and certainly not an oncologist. The CDC mentions that not smoking and wearing condoms also lower the risk. https://www.cdc.gov/cervical-cancer/prevention/index.html Anecdotally people smoke less thant they uses to. Don't know what condom usage rates have done in the past quarter century. > I assume that this particular shot is not the only thing that has reduced cervical cancer deaths in women under 30. Why would you assume that when presented with a study that tracks with long standing belief in the medical community that the HPV vaccine works? https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...