Funke was scrolling through posts on Facebook when she encountered content from a popular healthcare influencer on the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine and how it helps girls aged 9 to 14 prevent genital warts and cervical cancer.
“What about me?” she wondered. “I’m over 25 — can’t it help me avoid the pain and suffering from HPV-related diseases?”
Like Funke, you might be asking a similar question: Can adults over 25 get the HPV vaccine? This piece provides the burning answers you’ve been looking for.
What Are the Chances of Getting HPV After 25?
The risk of getting HPV after age 25 remains significant. The infection is most common during youth, especially because of social behaviours and risky lifestyles. In fact, within four years of becoming sexually active, about 63% of women become infected.
But the risk doesn’t end there — people over 25 can still catch HPV and remain at risk for the rest of their lives. Once infected, the virus might disappear or stay hidden in the body, only to come back later.
Unlike viruses such as chickenpox, getting HPV once doesn’t protect you from future infections. You can get infected again with the same or different HPV types, even if your body cleared the first infection.
Your chance of HPV infection after 25 increases with new sexual partners. This shows that natural protection doesn’t do much to defend against the virus throughout a woman’s life. In fact, many studies have shown a second rise in HPV cases after age 45 or 50, often around the time of menopause.
Why HPV Vaccination Matters for Adults
Over the past 30 years, people have been getting married later and more have experienced divorce. Because of this, it has become more common for people to have new romantic or sexual partners both before marriage and again in middle age, which adds to the ongoing risk of HPV.
If both young adults and older women still face this risk, why aren’t more adults being vaccinated? Some healthcare providers believe that older women must have already been infected, so the HPV vaccine for adults wouldn’t be useful. But is there a way to check if someone had HPV before getting vaccinated?
Currently, no commercial tests are available to confirm past HPV infections before vaccination. The tests that would be needed aren’t widely accessible, and even if they were, they would likely be expensive and difficult to use in many parts of the world — especially in regions like Nigeria and other low- and middle-income countries.
That’s why HPV vaccination for women over 25 remains one of the most practical and powerful ways to protect against cervical cancer, genital warts, and other HPV-related diseases.
In part two, we discussed what happened when the vaccine was administered to people over 25 years, and the result will amaze you. To learn more about HPV and how it can be prevented, you can follow us on Instagram or sign up for our newsletter.