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The American Fertility Association’s Monthly Newsletter

August 2, 2007

En Garde: Cheap Tobacco For New HPV Vac?

A cost-effective vaccine against HPV is in the works, say two of the researchers who helped develop Merck’s pricy Gardasil. The two University of Louisville-based scitentists, A. Bennett Jenson and Shin-je Ghim are working on a low-cost (as in $3 for three doses vs. $360 for Merck’s “miracle”) that protects against at least 13 HPV strains known to cause cervical cancer. Gardasil guards against four. The key? Inserting a newly created synthetic gene that expresses the L-2 protein in HPV into a tobacco virus to inexpensively grow the vaccine. After about 10 days, the researchers remove the tobacco parts and are left with the protein designed to induce antibodies to protect against HPV strains. according to new reports. Merck spokeswoman, Kirsten Eskin, told the Louisville Courier-Journal that the company is developing “dramatically lower” priced vaccines to be available in developing countries. Leading one health care advocate to wonder, ‘Why not in the U.S.? We’re not all rich, you know.”

Decline in Teen Sex Rate Stalls

2001 was a good year. The future that Stanley Kubrick envisioned didn’t quite materialize. We humans, not calm-talking computers, were still in charge. (A good thing? You decide.) And fewer adolescents were having sex than in previous six years. In that millineum year, the Centers for Disease Control surveyed a nationally representative sample of 13,000 9th through 12th graders and compared to 1995, a smaller percentage were engaging in sexual intercourse.

Now six years and tens of millions in federal dollars in “abstinence only” sex ed later, the government finds that 2001 was the year the teen sex rate plateaued, reports The Washington Post. Experts suggest a combination of factors, including the possibility of an increasing nonchalance about HIV/AIDS as well as human nature may underpin the stall. As Dr. John Santelli, a Columbia University professor of clinical pediatrics and chair of The Heilbrunn Department of Clinical Population and Family Health, postulated in the Post, perhaps “some irreducible portion of the teenage population can never be dissuaded from having sex… I think what we're seeing is the limits of the emphasis on abstinence as the primary message.

Michael Resnick, a teen health expert at the University of Minnesota told the Post, "My concern is that this plateau is ... a harbinger of a reversal of these positive trends." According to the Post, the survey also indicates that increases in condom use also might be waning. "It's not showing as strong of a stabilizing trend, but it's definitely slowing," David Landry of the Guttmacher Institute.

War, Stress and Fertility Tourism

In Afghanistan, where the stigma of infertility is entrenched, there has been an upsurge in the number of couples traveling to India for treatment since the official fall of the Taliban, the BBC reports. Indian gynecologist Helai Gupta, who has been treating Afghan couples for infertility for the last eight years, said of all the Afghan couples she has seen it is the men who were either infertile or had erectile dysfunction.

"These men are surprised when after tests I inform them that it is they and not their wives who have a problem," she said.

According to Dr. Gupta, these male reproductive issues are a function of the decades of war and exposure to stress that lead to hormonal disturbances.

India is the only country in South Asia that has sperm banks and can provide donor sperm from Kashmiri men, who have an ethnic look similar to Afghans.

Males Compromise Female Twins Fertlity? The Case for Singletons

As if we needed another impetus to reduce multiples, along comes a Sheffield University study that suggests a twin brother can compromise his twin sister’s reproductive capability. Researchers at Sheffield University published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that women with twin brothers were 25% less likely to have children. Although scientists said that other factors may play a role, they said exposure in the womb to testosterone that could impinge on female fertility is likely the leading culprit..

The team, lead by Dr Virpi Lummaa, conducted a retrospective study of the records of Finnish twins between the years 1734 to 1888, a pre-Industrial population that de facto weeds out the effects of advanced medical care and interventions.

Of 754 twins, females with a twin brother were 25% less likely to have children than females with a twin sister. Women with a male twin were also 15% less likely to marry.

Among the reasons the researchers offered: Females exposed to high levels of testosterone in utero increase the risk of reproductive diseases that damage fertility.

The Sheffield group said while animal study supported their hypothesis that more work was needed to look at human mechanisms.

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