The Food and Drug Administration approved Friday Merck & Co.'s cervical cancer vaccine, Gardasil, for the prevention of vulvar and vaginal cancer.

Gardasil, which was FDA-approved in 2006 as vaccine against the human papillomavirus or HPV, also protects against cancers of the vagina and vulva, which inflicts over 5,000 women in the U.S. annually, according to Merck

Federal health regulators have approved Merck and Co's HPV vaccine Gardasil to protect against rare vaginal and vulvar cancers in girls and women ages 9-26.

Gardasil, which targets four strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV) that cause most cases of cervical cancer, is already approved to help prevent a leading cause of cervical cancer in women of that same age range. Two of those HPV strains can also cause some vulvar and vaginal cancers

The vaccine against human papillomavirus (HPV), the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer, is very cost-effective when given to girls at age 12 but a government-funded now raises questions about the value of pushing for vaccinating women ages 13 to 21.

Two researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health who did the study took into account the benefit of an intervention such as a vaccine in terms of the person's health and also the cost of the intervention to determine the cost-effectiveness

Approval of GlaxoSmithKline PLC's cervical cancer vaccine Cervarix is expected to be delayed further after the drug maker decided to submit additional data to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Glaxo decided that it will add results from an ongoing phase III study called HPV-008 to its original application in the first half of 2009 and a decision by the FDA is expected six months later. The 2007 application now under consideration included only data from an earlier trial

A synthetic vaccine for human papillomavirus that can be delivered as a nasal spray has been successfully tested on mice, researchers say. The new vaccine would be able to offer protection against different strains of HPV, the source of the most common sexually transmitted disease in the United States and a cause of cervical cancer.

Richard B.S. Roden, lead researcher for the new study and an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, told Health Day news, "We have been trying to produce a single vaccine that would be able to protect patients against all cancer causing HPV types