While not our main focus, this paper also served to further demonstrate that the prevalent and incident detection of HPV16 (the HPV type that accounts for half of all cervical cancers) is more weakly associated with host immune status than other oncogenic HPV types, as we and others have previously reported(8). The relative independence of HPV16 infection from host immune status has been interpreted as evidence that HPV16 may be better able to avoid the effects of immune surveillance than other HPV types, and that this ability might help partly explain the predominance of HPV16 in cervical disease. The current study represents an update of the prior data, involving more than double the person-years of observation available at the time of our earlier report, and approximately a third of the women were new to the analysis.
