Good news graph
The Washington Post writes about cervical cancer: the vaccine works. This isn’t new news: we know the vaccine stops infection with cancer-causing strains of the human papillomavirus (that’s why it was approved). We know the vaccine stops cervical cancer: the first reliable data came out a few years ago. Now the first cohort of vaccinated girls is old enough that we’re seeing the reduction in cervical cancer deaths.
Using data from the National Center for Health Statistics, researchers looked at cervical cancer deaths in three-year blocks of time. Between 1992 and 2021, there were 398 cervical cancer deaths reported among women younger than 25. During the period of 1992-1994 to 2013-2015, mortality from cervical cancer gradually declined 3.7 percent each year. The period of 2013-2015 to 2019-2021 saw an even greater drop to 15.2 percent annually, according to the study.
The number of deaths decreased from 55 in 1992-1994 to 35 in 2013-2015 to 13 in 2019-2021.
“Assuming that the trend from 1992-1994 to 2013-2015 would have continued, an estimated 26 additional cervical cancer deaths would have been expected to occur between 2016 to 2021, based on projected mortality rates,” the authors wrote.
That description seems like a hard way to present this graph from the article in JAMA (perhaps copyright is the problem?)
The squares are what happened in reality. The orange line shows the downward trend we were seeing before the vaccine, due to better testing and treatment. As you can see, the last two squares, post-vaccine, are dramatically below the orange line. Below is good.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »