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by y-c-o-m-b 3194 days ago
This is also good news for people with elevated risks of acquiring HIV (such as people with Herpes). Hopefully they can use similar tactics to eradicate HSV and HPV next.
3 comments

From a medical standpoint, HSV and HPV are largely cosmetic and very low priority. HPV is/was perhaps a slightly higher priority because it can rarely lead to certain cancers, but the vaccine Gardasil aims at those types of HPV.
Only four strains, not all strains. Others kill up to nine different strains, but that's still not all potentially carcinogenic strains.
Given the sheer diversity of HPV strains, I'm doubtful that we'll ever eradicate it, as a number of them are either genuinely or largely benign, and an out and out viral eradication campaign is a long term, sustained and global effort that is invariably very expensive.

Actually getting the vaccines that cover the high risk strains into the developing world is a much more obtainable goal, and even that is extremely challenging for a number of reasons.

Don't they have the HPV vaccine Guardasil?
Gardasil gives immunity to a few different strands of HPV, notably the most dangerous ones in terms of causing cancer risk. I do not know if it is reasonable to expect we will ever be able to totally eradicate all strains of HPV. Luckily most strains are, like most strains of herpes, innocuous. That's how they manage to infect the vast majority of the populace in the first place.
As of a few years ago, a new variety of Gardasil, called Gardasil-9 was approved by the FDA and it induces immunity against more varieties.
That's excellent! I had not heard of the newer version, thanks for the info! I was very happy when I saw that they finally started recommending parents vaccinate boys as well as girls. I never understood the initial hesitance. Sure boys might not have to worry about cervical cancer, but HPV is the #1 cause of oral cancer in males. And that's on top of just the general 'if you can protect your child from a prevalent disease with minimal risk, why wouldn't you?'
Nine of them, as one could easily deduct. There's dozens of HPV strains, most of them relatively harmless.