(Credit:istockphoto)

(CBS News) the United States Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) released new cervical cancer screening guidelines today that recommend women ages 21 to 65 get a pap smear test every 3 years. for women under the age of 21, the task force does not recommend testing at all, even if they are sexually active.

Women ages 30 to 65 can prolong screening to every five years if they get a HPV test with it.

The guidelines, published online in the the March 14 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, also say that women under 30 should not be screened for HPV. Many benign infections that would go away on their own are found and could potentially cause more harm than good if caught, the task force said.

“It is as effective in reducing cancer deaths as annual screening but we have substantially less false positive tests,” task force member Dr. Wanda Nicholson, associate professor of gynecology and obstetrics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill School of Medicine, told CBS News.

Cervical cancer study shows Pap tests boost survival chancesHPV tests “better” than Pap smear at cervical cancer detection

However, not all doctors agree. “To blanketly say in these low risks patients 5 years is appropriate might be a stretch too far,” said Dr. Sharyn Lewin, an OB/GYN at NY Presbyterian-Columbia University Medical Center in New York City  told CBS News. she doesn’t think women should skip the annual checkup because it also includes important conversations about sexual health.

Another set of guidelines from the  American Cancer Society recommends that all women should begin cervical cancer testing three years after they become sexually active or after the age of 18 and no later than 21. A regular Pap test is recommended every year; a liquid-based Pap test only needs to be run every 2 years. Yearly testing is also recommended for women with more risk factors like a family history or weakened immune system.

If a woman over 30 had three normal Pap tests in a row or couples her test with a HPV DNA test , the American Cancer Society says the woman can get tested every 3 years. Women over 70 who have had 3 or more normal Pap tests in a row and no abnormal results for 10 years can opt not to get tested. Also, women who have had their cervix removed unless it was a result of cervical cancer or pre-cancer need not be tested.

More than 12,100 American women will be diagnosed with cervical cancer and another 4,220 will die from the disease this year, according to the National Cancer Institute.

The reason why screening is not recommended for women under 21, according to Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, is because a positive HPV test can lead to treatment that may cause a condition caused cervical incompetence or miscarriage years later. He wrote on CNN that most HPV infections that are not treated go away within nine months without any effects. Cervical cancer is a slow growing disease, and can take more than a decade to turn from HPV  to cervical cancer, he said.

Brawley points out that the majority of women who die from cervical cancer hadn’t been screened, and most of those who had been screened had done so 10 years before their diagnosis.

HealthPop reported this month that women are more likely to survive cervical cancer if diagnosed with a pap smear. Women whose cancer was found through the test had a 92 percent cure rate, while women who were diagnosed because of symptoms had a 66 percent cure rate.

That’s something that all organizations agree on, including the task force.

“We need to get the women who have not had a Pap smear in the past five years in,” Dr. Virginia Moyer, chair of the USPSTF and pediatrician at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital in Dallas, told Reuters Health. “The women who aren’t getting screened at all, that’s the tragedy.”

(Credit:istockphoto)

(CBS) An experimental herpes vaccine failed to protect young women from the disease in a new study, dashing hopes that a vaccine may soon be available to help prevent the sexually transmitted disease.

PICTURES: Bogus STD cures: are you taking one?

In a study of 8,300 women ages 18 to 30, the vaccine, developed by GlaxoSmithKline, partially protected against HSV-1, the strain of herpes which typically causes cold sores but can also cause genital herpes. The vaccine, however, did not protect against HSV-2, the strain that most commonly causes genital herpes.

“There is some very good news in our findings. We were partially successful against half of the equation – protecting women from genital disease caused by HSV-1,” study author Dr. Robert Belshe, director of the Saint Louis University Center for Vaccine Development, said in a written statement.

None of the women had any strain of herpes when the study began, and half of the women were given the experimental vaccine while the other half were given a hepatitis a vaccine. Doctors monitored the women for twenty months, and throughout the study, some women got herpes.  The experimental vaccine was 58 percent effective at preventing genital herpes from HSV-1, but did not show protection against HSV-2. The study was published in the Jan. 5 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Belshe said in the statement he was surprised the vaccine protected against one type of vaccine and not the other, but thinks that finding could lead to more research to better understand the disease.

“This is not the final vaccine,” Belshe told WebMD. “This information will help us a lot.”

Some experts aren’t as optimistic.

“I was very disappointed there wasn’t more of a benefit,” Dr. Bruce Hirsch, an attending physician in infectious diseases at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., who wasn’t involved in the study, told HealthDay. “I’m concerned if we’ll ever find a vaccine effective for HSV-2.”

“Enough vaccines have failed that companies are seeing herpes vaccines as a risky business,” added Dr. David Knipe, a virologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston. Knipe told Nature News he thinks the public sector might need to fund herpes vaccine research to further advance it.

More than 50 million U.S. adults have herpes, according to WebMD, with up to 1.6 new infections occurring each year. Abstinence is the only way to prevent the STD, and latex condoms can reduce the risk of transmission, but the disease still can spread with condom use. The CDC says persons with herpes should abstain from sexual activity with uninfected partners when lesions or other symptoms are present. But even without symptoms, herpes can still spread to a partner.

The CDC has more on genital herpes.

Mothers may play a key role in whether their daughters get the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, even if the daughters have already left the nest.

A new study found college-age women who talked with their mothers about the HPV vaccine were nine times more likely to get it than those who did not discuss it.

"It is an encouraging finding, because it shows that communication between mothers and daughters can be very helpful, even if it may be difficult sometimes," said study researcher Janice Krieger, an assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University.

However, researchers noted that the study was small and focused on students at one particular university, so its findings might not be representative of the population as a whole.

Many mothers and daughters may be uncomfortable talking about the HPV vaccine because it is designed to prevent the spread of a sexually transmitted virus, Krieger said.

But getting the three-shot vaccination series is important because a persistent HPV infection may cause cervical cancer, the researchers said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that girls and women ages 11 to 26 receive the vaccine. HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection, and will infect about half of sexually active people in the United States during their lifetimes.

Two vaccines are currently approved by the Food and Drug Administration to protect girls and women against HPV: Gardasil, manufactured by Merck & Co., and Cervarix, manufactured by GlaxoSmithKline. The study involved 182 mother-daughter pairs. all of the daughters were Ohio State students, and their average age was 20.

The daughters mailed a questionnaire about the HPV vaccine to their mothers and completed a similar questionnaire themselves.

Overall, 137 of the mother-daughter pairs said they had talked about the HPV vaccine; the other 45 pairs reporting not discussing the vaccine.

Results showed that daughters who discussed getting the vaccine with their mothers, and those who reported believing that the vaccine was safe and effective in preventing HPV-related diseases, were more likely than the others to get the vaccine .

The researchers also found that fears about susceptibility to HPV and about the severity of HPV-caused illness – on the parts of mothers or daughters – were not related to whether they talked about the issue.

"Fear does not seem to be the motivator," Krieger said.

The data don't show what the women talked about when they discussed the HPV vaccine, but Krieger said she suspects that one topic was the vaccine's cost, which has been reported to range from $360 to $600 for the series of three shots.

That could be one reason few young women are vaccinated. It also would be one reason why it is important to get mothers involved, even after their daughters reach adulthood, Krieger said.

"most women in early adulthood don't have a lot of extra money, and even if they do, a preventive vaccine like the HPV vaccine may not be high on their list of things to buy," she said.

One recent study found that just one-third of teens and young women who start the three-dose vaccine series actually finish, and almost three-quarters don't start it at all.

"Mothers may be afraid to bring up the topic, but it doesn't have to be a conversation focused on sex. Mothers can talk about how the HPV vaccine is safe and effective, and that it prevents cancer," Krieger said.

The study appears in the January issue of the journal Human Communication Research.

Pass it on: Moms may play an important role in persuading their college-age daughters to get the HPV vaccine.

• FDA Approves Gardasil to Prevent Anal Cancer
• HPV Vaccine Sees Poor Completion Rates
• Cervical Cancer: Symptoms, Treatment and Prevention

Follow MyHealthNewsDaily on Twitter @MyHealth_MHND.

• Original story: Young Women Get HPV Shots after Talking It Over with Mom

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