Condoms protect women vs. genital virus, study says

A three-year study of female college students — all virgins at the start — found that women whose partners always wore a condom during sex were 70 percent less likely to become infected with the human papilloma virus, or HPV, than those whose partners used protection less than 5 percent of the time.

"There aren't too many times when you can have an intervention that would offer so much protection," said Dr. Patricia Kloser, an infectious-disease specialist at University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey who was not part of the study.

Condoms have been shown convincingly to prevent pregnancy and AIDS.

But conservatives who want to see abstinence taught in schools have long argued that condoms do not protect well against such diseases as HPV, because men can spread the virus to women from sores on their genitals outside the area covered by a condom.

But the researchers at the University of Washington found the chances of HPV being spread that way appear to be small.

Human papilloma virus — which can cause cervical cancer, genital warts and vaginal, vulvar, anal and penile cancers — is the most common sexually transmitted disease.

HPV infects about 80 percent of young women within five years of becoming sexually active. An estimated 630 million people worldwide are infected.

The virus is spread during sex from contact with the sores, or lesions, that develop around infected cells.

Often, the virus is killed by the immune system, but in some people HPV can take hold and cause lesions that can turn cancerous years later.

Cervical cancer strikes about 10,520 American women and kills about 3,500 each year.

Worldwide, about 500,000 women develop cervical cancer, and nearly 300,000 die from it every year.

In the HPV study, published in today's New England Journal of Medicine, none of the women who reported that their partners always used condoms developed lesions during the three-year period.