Luciana Berger – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Luciana Berger on 2014-06-10.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many (a) women and (b) men have cancers caused by the human papilloma virus.

Jane Ellison

At present the number of people living with Human papillomavirus (HPV) related cancers is not known for several reasons;

– there is no nationally collated database of individual patients’ records containing the HPV status of their cancers;

– prevalence figures are not known for all types of cancer i.e. the number of people who have been diagnosed and are still alive; and

– many people alive after treatment of cancer will have been cured and will not consider themselves to be still living with a cancer.

However it has been estimated by Parkin¹ that the number of new cases per year, of cancers in the United Kingdom, which maybe HPV related as 5,088 (1.6% of all newly diagnosed cancer cases). Of these 4,058 are females and 1,030 are males. This is based on incidence rates for 2010.

Public Health England (PHE) has calculated a prevalence estimate for the number of women who are currently alive following treatment of their cervical cancer and this is at least 19,000. Many of these will be cured.

Later this year PHE will publish prevalence estimates i.e. the number of people living with the other types of HPV related cancers.

Notes:

Parkin, D M. Cancers attributable to infection in the UK in 2010

British Journal of Cancer (2011) 105, S49 – S56; doi:10.1038/bjc.2011.484