Stanford Students for Choice (SSFC), Vaden Health Center and the Public Health Initiative have combined forces to educate the University community about the newly-approved vaccine for Human Papillomavirus (HPV), culminating in this week’s HPV Vaccine Awareness Campaign.

The HPV vaccine was approved for females aged 12-26 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on June 8, 2006. Certain strains of HPV have been causally linked to cervical cancer in women, and can be spread through sexual contact. The new vaccine — which protects against the four strains of HPV most commonly associated with cervical cancer — is 99.9 percent effective in protecting against these four strains.

Kate Benham ‘09, vice president of publicity for SSFC, said the campaign was initiated to increase awareness about HPV and to combat the stigma associated with the disease.

“HPV has a stigma on campus,” she said. “The really interesting thing is how common it is. So what we’ve been trying to do is inform people and de-stigmatize the talk about having the virus.”

Vaden does not release statistics about the prevalence of HPV on campus, but Sexual Health Peer Resource Center (SHPRC) counselor Maggie Chen ‘09 said the virus is one of the most common sexually transmitted infections on campus.

Nancy Wang ‘07 expressed concern about the vaccine’s safety, and also cited its high cost — each shot of the vaccine’s three-part sequence costs $135 — as a reason for not being vaccinated against HPV.

“There’s questions of how safe it is, so I want to wait until more trials and stuff have been run,” she said. “It also costs a lot; that’s the main reason I haven’t gotten it.”

Joel Palefsky, professor at the UC-San Francisco School of Medicine, warned against waiting too long to get the vaccine.

“If a woman is waiting for more data,” he said, “get vaccinated before you’re exposed — the sooner the better.”

Benham cautioned that a monogamous relationship is not necessarily a reason for avoiding the vaccine.

“There is still a high chance of encountering the virus whenever you have sex,” she said, “or whoever you have sex with.”

SSFC provides more information about the virus at http://hpvinfo.stanford.edu.