HPV, vaccines, and cervical cancer in a low- and middle-income country

Real-world conditions test effectiveness, the next step after establishing efficacy in controlled settings. From the annual flu shot to HPV vaccination, effectiveness measures what happens when best efforts for vaccine development meet the realities of challenging viruses and changing subtypes in regions around the world. After testing 2,645 women from multiple locations in Honduras for types of high-risk HPV (hrHPV) and finding the prevalence of virus types to be quite different from those in the US, we asked what vaccine would be the most efficacious for the local situation, and which hrHPV types are most commonly found in cervical cancer tissues from Honduran women.