American vaccine deniers got a lot of attention during the measles outbreak earlier this year, but there's another vaccine that's equally if not more important to promote: that which works against the human papillomavirus (HPV). A huge fraction of U.S. adults already have some form of HPV, and it's responsible for some 26,800 cases of cancer each year.
But as Dr. Aaron Carroll explains below, it would be quite easy to eradicate HPV. Simply vaccinate all children around the ages of 11-12 (before they become sexually active), and it would be gone in a few decades. But for a variety of reasons, it hasn't happened yet:
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