Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt is facing fresh calls to start vaccinating teenage boys against human papilloma virus (HPV), the cause of Britain’s fastest-growing form of cancer, amid the first signs the NHS may be about to change its policy.

Last week, Tory peer Baroness Altmann backed the pro-vaccination campaign run by this newspaper by raising the issue in the House of Lords.

Supported by colleagues including Lord Patel, chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Men’s Health, she told Health Minister Lord O’Shaughnessy that the only way to protect men ‘is to vaccinate them before they become sexually active, as they already do in many countries… rather than leaving them vulnerable to potentially fatal cancers when it will be too late’.

As the MoS has revealed, HPV – spread by sexual contact and kissing – causes thousands of devastating tumours every year, many in the head and neck which, in men, is the fourth most common type of cancer. But although girls aged 12 and 13 have been vaccinated on the NHS since 2008, because it also causes cervical cancer, vaccinating boys is not considered ‘cost-effective’.

The vaccine, which costs less than £40 for a two-dose course, grants total protection, and our campaign is backed by health organisations and cancer specialists. MPs from all parties support our campaign.

The Health Secretary is facing fresh calls to start vaccinating teenage boys against human papilloma virus (HPV)

Labour Shadow Health Minister Sharon Hodgson said the NHS ‘must go further to include all adolescent boys so that, like their female peers, they can be protected’. Tory MP Sir Paul Beresford, who practices as a dentist, said he was ‘appalled’ by the failure to immunise boys: ‘It is not fair, ethical, or socially responsible to have a public health policy that leaves 50 per cent of the population vulnerable to HPV and head and neck cancer.’

Minutes of a meeting in February by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation – the NHS committee which guides vaccine policy – reveal signs of a policy shift. Describing the committee’s previous ruling that vaccinating boys is not cost-effective as only ‘borderline’, the minutes say the DoH will now allow it to alter the basis of the computer model that led to its previous decision.

They also mention a pending High Court judicial review, which will be launched by the Throat Cancer Foundation if the committee does not change its mind, on grounds of gender discrimination. Before it makes a final decision, the minutes say, the committee will seek legal advice as to whether denying boys the vaccine is lawful.

Commenting on the apparent shift in policy, Public Health England’s Mary Ramsay said that, although vaccinating boys had not been seen as cost effective, ‘updated results are closer to the threshold of cost-effectiveness’. Therefore the committee ‘decided it would be reasonable to refine the models further’.