Thursday, Merck and Company, the drug manufacturer behind the Gardasil HPV vaccine, revealed that the medicine aimed at protecting girls and women from cervical cancer could also be effective in protecting men from the human papilloma virus.

Research conducted by a team of scientists at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute in Tampa, Florida, which was led by Anna Giuliano found that Gardasil was 90 percent effective in preventing sexually transmitted warts in men.

Merck’s Gardasil protects girls and women from four strains of HPV, namely HPV-6, 11, 16, 18. Where having the same result in men as in women was concerned, the study concluded that the vaccine was 45 percent effective in preventing men from suffering from infection with the four types of the virus.

Researchers looked at 4,065 men aged 16 to 26, discovering that if the vaccine was given before the participants had ever been infected with HPV, Gardasil prevented the men from developing genital warts, as well as a precancerous condition called perianal intraepithelial neoplasia.

Merck and Company made the findings public this week, at the European Research Organization on Genital Infection and Neoplasia International Multidisciplinary Conference.

Currently, the human papilloma virus is the most common sexually transmitted disease worldwide, while statistics released by the united States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggest that presently, 20 million Americans are infected with HPV.

Moreover, HPV is the main cause of cervical cancer, a type of the cancer responsible for the death of 3,870 women a year in the U.S., while its worldwide annual death-toll amounts to 300,000 women.

In men, infection with the human papilloma virus can lead to warts and anal and penile cancer.