After reading through Sarid and Gao’s 2011 article, It would be my belief that it’s HPV strains 31 and 45 that should be considered the most crucial in terms of developing a new treatment.
While there are many HPV strains which aren’t understood well enough to fully gauge how grave their effects may be on human health, and others which have been shown correlate to various cancers throughout the human body, there are currently only four “high-risk” HPV types: 16, 18, 31, and 45. Of these four known cancer-causers (which are responsible for up to 80% of ALL cervical cancer cases), strains 16 and 18 have already been met with effective treatments. This effectively narrows the most necessary subjects of medical research to HPVs 31 and 45.
While some of the other HPV variations which are less well studied may also be incredibly important to treat or cure, current knowledge on these iterations is just to sparse to justify intensive medical research. Additionally, the funds and time required to bring these outliers into a more reasonable level of awareness would be better spent trying to providing tangible care systems for versions 31 and 45, which we already know to be crucially important. After all, would you rather spend 10 years dying from a disease while trying to figure out how bad another one was, or allocate the resources necessary to quell the first disease before seeking to understand the second?
On another note, as far as when to treat is concerned, given that HPV is a virus and that many viruses are considered near impossible to treat or cure, care should be prophylactically administered before any infections occur at all, providing the lowest risk of the affliction progressing towards oncogenesis.
