Anecdote time (and some info from real life EMTs and Oncologist). I just recently “won” the cancer lottery related to this.
Never had the HPV vaccine. Honestly thought it was only for young girls (didn’t spare topic a thought, zero time investigating).
80-90% of adults gets some form of HPV during lifetime. Often several strains. Each have different risks of cancer. Even if you’re married - if you or your partner experience a severely stressful period- it might reactivate.
Most people’s immune systems clears HPV, and makes it dormant. (Mine likely doesn’t see HPV as a threat.
Long term (10y+?) exposure to active HPV cause cancer.
If you can, at least do your very best to avoid the cancer nightmare. Take the vaccine. Worst case it protects you from being a vector.
It’s an imperfect insurance from 3-4 months in/out of hospitals, scans, blood work, from chronic dry mouth,all food tasting very bad, issues with energy, possible bone death (that you suddenly have to monitor every day for the test. Oh, and any alcohol or smoking after having had this increases risk of recurrence by 30-50%
They really cared about that piece of intellectual property too.
Anecdote time: Back in the early 00’s I was part of a small team developing a mobile phone for Docomo (using Openwave’s framework).
Bug came back saying Docomo emojis are the wrong color. To which we replied, tell us the color codes and we’ll fix it. The reply was, we cannot - because Docomo emoji colors are secret.
Those were good times! :)
The bug was set to WONTFIX and ignored. It was brought up in meetings on occasion (to some hilarity). Took a surprising amount of time for people to realize it wasn’t going to get resolved without a specification. There might have been some cultural differences at play, but mostly I think the Japanese company we dealt with had almost as little insight into Docomo as us half a world away.
The secret color chart eventually surfaced during compliance testing, the bug was resolved, and everyone lived happily ever after.
80-90% of adults gets some form of HPV during lifetime. Often several strains. Each have different risks of cancer. Even if you’re married - if you or your partner experience a severely stressful period- it might reactivate. Most people’s immune systems clears HPV, and makes it dormant. (Mine likely doesn’t see HPV as a threat. Long term (10y+?) exposure to active HPV cause cancer.
If you can, at least do your very best to avoid the cancer nightmare. Take the vaccine. Worst case it protects you from being a vector. It’s an imperfect insurance from 3-4 months in/out of hospitals, scans, blood work, from chronic dry mouth,all food tasting very bad, issues with energy, possible bone death (that you suddenly have to monitor every day for the test. Oh, and any alcohol or smoking after having had this increases risk of recurrence by 30-50%