80% of sexually active Americans get an STD.

Potentially NSFW source: link. Note... I wouldn't have claimed this if I hadn't seen this number quoted elsewhere as well... I'm probably linking to the least-worthwhile of the sources I've seen.

I find the term "STD" to be very poorly defined.

For one thing, there are no diseases that are only transmitted sexually. And virtually every disease that can be transmitted can be transmitted sexually.

Hepatitis B is generally considered an STD, but it is transmissible from week old room temperature dried out blood if it gets into an open cut. It's also potentially fatal. That disease scares me; it's why I got vaccinated (which is highly recommended for anyone who works with children or in the health care industry).

Herpes is generally considered a sexually transmitted disease, but it's transmitted through physical contact. There has been a case of a baby getting herpes because it was on a parent's finger when the parent was changing the baby's diaper. You can have HSV2 on the mouth or genitals (although on the genitals is more common) and it can be transmitted between those locations. Which means you can get it from kissing and then spread it to your own genitals by going to the bathroom after having touched your mouth. But it counts as an STD. Herpes is also one of the most common STDs. On a side note, herpes is a member of the same family as chicken pox, or as it is usually worded, chicken pox is a member of the herpes family. Chicken pox, like herpes, once had stays with you for life. While it will not remanifest as chicken pox in most cases, it can remanifest as shingles. Chicken pox and herpes have a lot of similarity but one is officially an STD and the other is not. This is probably large based on how HSV2 used to be found in the mouth region far less often, but it has been appearing on mouths more commonly over time.

So, when we say "sexually transmitted" we often mean physical contact of any skin to skin sort. I've even seen public lice (also known as "crabs") listed with STD info and you can get those from infested bedding. Some people list scabies in that category, which is also a parasite. But whenever you have something that tells you to treat not just your sexual partners but everyone in your household, I have trouble viewing it as being primarily sexually transmitted.

Oh and some people count urinary tract infections as STDs. While they can certainly be transmitted through sexual activity you can get them without ever having had sex too (especially if you're female). So, if you count UTIs, that's a bit silly.

Personally, I feel we should drop the term "STD" and start talking about avenues of transmission. We have our blood-based transmission, our fluid-based transmission, our skin contact based transmission, our air-based transmission - and thinking in these terms makes it easier to think about which activities are risky. You need to remember that these risks exist even when you're engaging in totally non-sexual activities. And you need to remember which diseases a condom will give you good protection against and which it won't or will give you less.

Basically, it's a complicated area, and I think simplification hurts people.

My gyno claims that all people who've had sex with more than one partner have contracted HPV which is the most common sexually transmitted disease out there. He said that basically everyone has it, but only certain strains are the ones that cause cancer in females and males show no symptoms whatsoever. If this is true, then this claim is probably true based on that alone.

It's definitely true that not all strains cause cancer, although very recent research seems to indicate that the strains that may increase the odds for cervical cancer in women may also increase the odds for throat cancer in both women and men. However, getting those strains does not mean you will get cancer. It increases your risk, but many people will get HPV and not get cancer.

Also, they say most people who get HPV will have their own body and immune system deal with it and have it totally out of their body after five years. HPV is not necessarily forever the way herpes is, but is more like getting a cold or flu - it can have dire effects but often you'll have negative effects for a while and then get better.

The human body is remarkably good at fixing itself from all sorts of things. The immune system is pretty impressive. Obviously, it can't fix everything and it can't handle all things. But we focus on the cases when it breaks, since those are the things we still need to work on fixing, and it's easy to forget just how often someone can get sick or get exposed to something and get better all by themselves. This doesn't mean you should take a chance and not see a doctor if you may have a real risk. But often people just get better, and that's a good thing.

I didn't know that it went away after a period of time. I was under the distinct impression that once you had it, that was it. I suppose a lot of cases occur where it gets passed back and forth so that it sticks around. I also didn't know it caused anything other than cervical cancer. Throat cancer in men? That's rare though right? Like you said, the immune system is impressive.

Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine is a vaccine that targets certain strains of human papillomavirus associated with the development of cervical cancer and genital warts. Two HPV vaccines are currently on the market: Gardasil and Cervarix. American, Australian, Canadian and European public health officials recommend widespread vaccination against HPV because of high infection rates worldwide, a desire to reduce the number of painful and costly treatments for cervical dysplasia which is caused by HPV, and the desire to prevent genital warts and cervical cancer. Infection with sexually transmitted HPV is the most common sexually transmitted disease in adult populations worldwide. For example, more than 80% of American women will have contracted at least one strain of HPV by age fifty.

Worldwide there are an estimated 470,000 new cases of cervical cancer that result in 233,000 deaths per year. About eighty percent of deaths from cervical cancer occur in poor countries. In the United States, most of the approximately 11,000 cervical cancers found annually[11] occur in women who have never had a Pap smear, or not had one in the previous five years.

Though most American women infected with genital HPV will not suffer complications from the virus, it is the case that each year between 250,000 and 1 million US women are diagnosed with cervical dysplasia. Cervical Dysplasia is caused by HPV and is a condition that can lead to cancer. Most dysplasia will heal without treatment; high-grade dysplasia is treated with electrocauterization (LEEP), cryosurgery, cryocauterization, laser vaporization or ablation, or cone biopsy. No data is kept by the U.S. government on genital wart infection rates, however it is estimated that 20 million people are presently infected with genital warts, and there are six million new cases of genital warts every year in the United States.

Since the vaccine only covers some high-risk types of HPV, experts still recommend regular Pap smear screening even after vaccination.

In work that was initiated in the mid 1980s, the vaccine was developed, in parallel, by researchers at Georgetown University Medical Center, the University of Rochester, the University of Queensland in Australia, and the U.S. National Cancer Institute. In 2006, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first preventive HPV vaccine, marketed by Merck & Co. under the tradename Gardasil. According to Merck press release, in the second quarter 2007, it had been approved in 80 countries, many under fast-track or expedited review. Early in 2007, GlaxoSmithKline filed for approval in the United States for a similar preventive HPV vaccine, known as Cervarix. In June 2007 this vaccine was licenced in Australia, and it was approved in the European Union in September 2007.

Therapeutic HPV vaccines. In addition to preventive vaccines, such as Gardasil and Cervarix, laboratory research and several human clinical trials are focused on the development of therapeutic HPV vaccines. In general these vaccines focus on the main HPV oncogenes, E6 and E7. Since expression of E6 and E7 is required for promoting the growth of cervical cancer cells (and cells within warts), it is hoped that immune responses against the two oncogenes might eradicate established tumors.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, by the age of 50 more than 80% of American women will have contracted at least one strain of genital HPV. Both men and women can be carriers of HPV. HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the US. A large percentage of the American population is infected with genital HPV because HPV is highly communicable. As a result, American public health experts recommend wide-spread HPV vaccination.

Only a small percentage of women with HPV develop cervical cancer. Each year, between 250,000 and 1 million American women are diagnosed with cervical dysplasia, which is caused by HPV and is a potential precursor to cervical cancer. About 11,000 American women are diagnosed with cervical cancer every year, and about 3,700 die per year of the disease. Most cancers occur in those who have not had Pap smears within the previous five years.

There are 19 "high-risk" HPV types that can lead to the development of cervical cancer or other genital/anal cancers; some forms of HPV, particularly type 16, have been found to be associated with a form of throat cancer. Studies have found that human papillomavirus (HPV) infection is responsible for virtually all cases of cervical cancer.

Condoms protect against HPV, but do not completely prevent transmission. College freshmen women who used condoms consistently had a 37.8% per patient-year incidence of genital HPV, compared to an incidence of 89.3% among those who did not.

Vaccine Target populations.
Gardasil and Cervarix are preventative (rather than therapeutic) vaccines, recommended for women who are 9 to 25 years old and have not contracted HPV. However, since it is unlikely that a woman will have already contracted all four viruses, and because HPV is primarily sexually transmitted, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended vaccination for women up to 26 years of age.

Although HPV types 6 and 11 do not cause cervical cancer, they can cause genital warts. "Warts cause considerable discomfort and psycho-social trauma, so this makes the vaccine more attractive and also provides a reason other than altruism for men to be immunized," explains John Schiller of the National Cancer Institute.[34] From a public health point of view, vaccinating men as well as women might be important if it decreased the virus pool within the population. HPV also causes anal and penile cancer. In the UK the vaccine is licensed for girls and boys aged 9 to 15 and for women aged 16 to 26. Thus, the vaccine has to be administered to adult men "off license".

When Gardasil was first introduced, it was recommended as a prevention for cervical cancer for women that were 25 years old or younger. New evidence suggests that all Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccines are effective in preventing cervical cancer for women up to 45 years of age.

In November 2007, Merck presented new data on Gardasil. This data indicated that in an investigational study, their HPV vaccine reduced incidence of HPV 6, 11, 16 and 18-related persistent infection and disease in women through age 45. The study evaluated women who were free of infection from at least one vaccine HPV type at the beginning of the study, and who remained free of infection with the relevant HPV type(s) until they completed the three-dose vaccination series. Merck planned to submit this data before the end of 2007 to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and to seek an indication for Gardasil for women through age 45.

Mechanism of action. The latest generation of preventive HPV vaccines are based on hollow virus-like particles (VLPs) assembled from recombinant HPV coat proteins. The vaccines target the two most common high-risk HPVs, types 16 and 18. Together, these two HPV types currently cause about 70 percent of all cervical cancer. Gardasil also targets HPV types 6 and 11, which together currently cause about 90 percent of all cases of genital warts.

Gardasil and Cervarix are designed to elicit virus-neutralizing antibody responses that prevent initial infection with the HPV types represented in the vaccine. The vaccines have been shown to offer 100 percent protection against the development of cervical pre-cancers and genital warts caused by the HPV types in the vaccine, with few or no side effects. The protective effects of the vaccine are expected to last a minimum of 4.5 years after the initial vaccination.

While the study period was not long enough for cervical cancer to develop, the prevention of these cervical precancerous lesions (or dysplasias) is believed highly likely to result in the prevention of those cancers.

Although a 2006 study suggests that the vaccines may offer limited protection against a few HPV types that are closely related to HPVs 16 and 18, it is clear that other high-risk HPV types can circumvent the vaccines, Ongoing research is focused on the development of HPV vaccines that will offer protection against a broader range of HPV types. There is also substantial research interest in the development of therapeutic vaccines, which seek to elicit immune responses against established HPV infections and HPV-induced cancers.

Vaccine implementation; vaccination policy.
In developed countries, the widespread use of good-quality cervical "Pap smear" screening programs has reduced the incidence of invasive cervical cancer by 50% or more. Current preventive vaccines offer protection against the two HPV types (16 & 18) that currently cause about 70% of cervical cancer cases. Therefore, experts recommend that women combine the benefits of both programs by seeking regular Pap smear screening, even after vaccination.

I think that summarises things nicely.

There's a new shot out now called gardisal that prevents cancer causing strains of hpv from being attained. Hpv is a leading cause of cervical cancer and a lot of people don't realize it until it's too late. While most people with hpv aren't affected, it's still a good preventative. Although i don't know how long they've been testing any possible side effects.

The vaccination does not protect you from all cancer causing strains, just most of them. The statistic I have seen is about 70% protection. Or you can read XISTH's comment for lots of detailed info.

wow, i wouldn't have bothered with mine had yours popped up in a timely fashion. holy crap.