 If you could take a shot to protect yourself from cancer or your children from cancer, would you? Take cervical cancer for instance. Virtually all cervical cancers are caused by a virus, the human papillomavirus, more commonly known as HPV. And where there's a virus, there's the possibility of training the body to block it by using vaccines. In other words, cervical cancer could be prevented in principle by a simple series of shots, which is exactly what has happened. In 2009, the US Food and Drug Administration approved two vaccines for protection against cervical cancer. These were Cervarix, a vaccine that's approved for girls and women between the ages of 9 and 25, and works on two of the highest risk strains of HPV, and Gardasil, a vaccine that's approved for use by females and males between the ages of 9 and 26 and protects against four of the highest risk strains of HPV. The development of these vaccines was great news for public health and prompted the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend that girls and boys between the ages of 11 and 12 are vaccinated against HPV. But this advice raises some challenging questions. Why children? Why boys as well as girls? And what, if any, are the risks of getting vaccinated? CDC recommended vaccinating children as this gives them the opportunity to develop immunity before they become sexually active. Scientists are still studying how long that immunity lasts. Remember, the vaccine has only been widely available since 2009 in the US. But so far, research indicates that people who have been vaccinated retain immunity for at least five years. It could be a lot longer. And this immunity is just as important for boys as it is for girls. As well as reducing the chances of them infecting a partner with HPV when they do become sexually active, there are a number of particularly unpleasant cancers associated with HPV that men get, including cancer of the penis and the rectum. And as if that wasn't enough, there are growing concerns that many head and neck cancers in men and women are also related to HPV. So far, so good. But are the risks associated with taking the vaccine? So far, research indicates that the health impacts of the vaccine are extremely, almost vanishingly small. The vaccine doesn't contain the virus itself and so there's no chance of unintentional infection. As with other vaccines, some people may feel dizzy or sick or get a slight fever or have a sore arm after the jab. And an incredibly small number of people, somewhere around 1 in 300,000 to 1 in 1 million people who are vaccinated, may get more seriously sick a few days after being vaccinated. But, and this is a big but, because of the way these health impacts are reported, there's no way of telling whether people have got sick because of the vaccine or because of something else that just happened to occur around the same time. And so the chances are that the likely rates of vaccine-related complications are even lower than the statistics might suggest. So back to that original question. If you could take a shot to prevent cancer, would you? Of course, this is a personal decision, whether it's for you or your children. But considering that most people will be infected with HPV at some point in their lives and thinking about the types of cancer this virus can cause, for many people, the benefits are far more likely to outweigh the downsides. For more information on HPV vaccines, please see the links in the blurb below. And don't forget to join the conversation in the comments.