Condoms - good protection against cervical cancer

Condoms - good protection against cervical cancer

The virus is the most common sexually transmitted disease. About 20 million people in the U.S. currently have HPV, and at least 50 percent of sexually active men and women will experience an infection in their lifetime, Chicago Tribune reports.

Although most cases of HPV produce no symptoms and clear up on their own, the virus can cause genital warts and lesions that lead to cervical and other reproductive cancers.

Results of an 82-person study published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that women who said their male partners always used condoms were 70 percent less likely to develop a human papillomavirus (HPV) infection than women whose partners used them less than 5 percent of the time, Rreuters reports.