Sabina Pfister tightens the tourniquet around the young girl’s arm and clucks in sympathy at her discomfort. “This will only hurt for a minute,” Pfister murmurs as she disinfects the area with an alcohol swab. She holds the syringe up to the light for a moment before plunging the needle into the reddened skin. Pfister has just injected the girl with herpes.

Pfister works for Quest Women’s Clinic, a clinical research center currently studying the vaccination of herpes and human papilloma virus (HPV) for two major pharmaceutical companies.

HPV is a lesser-known sexually transmitted disease which spreads through skin-to-skin contact, so it can’t be prevented with condoms. The virus is responsible for 70 percent of cervical cancer cases and 90 percent of genital warts worldwide. The Department of Health and Human Services estimates that by the age of 50, at least 80 percent of women will have acquired the infection.

The vaccine to combat herpes contains one piece of the virus, just enough to encourage the immune system to fight off infection. Quest is one of the leading test sites for Glaxo Smith Kline’s (GSK) Herpevac vaccine and one of 41 locations in the United States and Canada. The vaccines are currently being tested on healthy women between the ages of 18 and 30 with no history of oral or genital herpes. “The Herpevac vaccine is in its third phase and has already been safely tested on over 15,000 women,” explains Dr. Jacob Lalezari, director of Quest Research, the parent company of Quest Women’s Clinic. “We’re trying to do what we can to make it publicly available. After all, 75 percent of people in the U.S. are affected. It doesn’t matter if you’re rich, poor, black or white; everyone is susceptible.”

Allison Pasciuto has been involved in the study for more than six months. Though she assumed she was not infected, it was still a relief to receive the good news. “When it was time to call for my results, I racked my brain trying to remember if I’ve ever had a cold sore,” she says. “At first I had the irrational fear, you know, ‘Am I going to get some bizarre disease from this?’ But the work they’re doing at Quest will be so important down the road.”

“Our goal is to have 250 people enrolled in the study; we only have 130 right now,” says 24-year-old Clinical Research Coordinator Erin Schwartz. “It’s difficult to reach the numbers we want. Out of 10 people screened, only four are eligible and the other six already have herpes in some form or another.”

The numbers of ineligible test subjects prove Lalezari’s point that 90 percent of infected individuals don’t even realize they have the virus. “Most of the time it just looks like a little tear in the skin,” he
says. “But those little tears are responsible for the fact that everyone has herpes.”

The American Social Health Association has established a confidential hotline in partenership with GSK to inform test subjects of their results. Counselors are on-call to help with the startling news. “It’s funny how some people react. They’ve had cold sores their whole lives but they freak out because they're not ok with calling it herpes,” Schwartz says. “One woman who tested positive came back to the office and demanded her test results because she wanted to ‘sue the bastard’ who gave it to her.”

Despite the frequency of herpes, Lalezari claims HPV is an even greater threat to sexual health. “HPV is the most common STD in the world,” he says. “Close to 80 percent of sexually active adults will contract it in their lifetime and most people don’t even know what it is. It’s so much worse than herpes. With over 100 different strains, it’s the leading cause of cancer death among women around the world.”

Luckily, there is some good news on the horizon for sexually active adults. Both GSK and Merck have developed a vaccine to combat the two most deadly strains of the virus. Out of the original study involving 2,300 women, half were given the vaccine and half were given a placebo. At the three-year checkpoint in the group given the placebo, 82 women already had either the infection or pre-cancer, while the group given the vaccine was 100 percent unaffected. “HPV is a big deal in the U.S., but it’s an even bigger deal worldwide,” Sarah MacKay, a 30-year-old nurse practitioner at the clinic says. “Here in the U.S. we have way more access to preventative medicine, but the issue with cervical cancer is it's not detected early in other countries. It’s exciting to think of a world without HIV, HPV or herpes. Not today, but maybe ten years from now.”

Other countries recognize the importance of the HPV vaccine. According to Lalezari, every woman living in Finland between the ages of 16 and 23 is enrolled in the study. “We had to run ads and beg people to participate but they’ve got the whole country signed up due to universal healthcare,” he says. “If this holds up, every young girl will be a candidate for vaccine. Once this gets approved, if we can protect every woman in the right age bracket, we can almost wipe this out.”

Quest offers incentives to women enrolled in the studies, such as confidential health care and goody bags of free gifts. “This has been a great experience for me," Pasciuto says. "I would love to do another study with Quest. Everyone at the clinic is really cool, and it’s always nice to come and hang out on the couch and talk to Erin and Sarah. It’ll almost be sad when its all over.”

The rumor around the clinic is the vaccine will be presented to the FDA in one year and hopefully on the market within two. But despite its benefits, there are groups around the country who want this kept under wraps. “You’ve got the political right-wing lunatics screaming that this vaccine shouldn’t be provided because it lowers the threshold of the fear of sex,” Lalezari says.

But Schwartz feels vaccinating children at a young age can only help, both with their sexual health and education. “You have to be real as a parent. You can’t refuse to protect your children because you don’t want them to have sex,” she says. “I think it’s a great idea to arm them against these scary things young because some day they could have sex with someone dirty who gives them an awful disease.”