Study: Condoms protect against HPV

Conservatives have been robbed of one of their favorite weapons in their fight against comprehensive sex education.

When pressed as to why, exactly, they don't want sexually-active people to use condoms, they argue that condoms don't offer protection against Human Papiloma Virus, or HPV. HPV can cause cervical cancer in some women. Condoms, conservatives say, give people a false sense of security. They think they are protected, but they are not. Therefore, conservatives insist, abstinence-only sex education is the only way to keep people safe from the hazards of pre-marital sex.

However, it turns out that condom do offer protection against HPV, after all.

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.

"That's pretty awesome. 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 diseases such as HPV, because men can spread the virus to women from sores on their genitals outside the area covered by a condom.

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