HPV - Cervical CancerFollow

So, when are you getting your shot?

Requiring it is simply about money for Merck. This is a preventative vaccine against a disease that poses little to no risk in terms of public health (ie: it's not small pox or mumps etc.) There's absolutely no compelling reason at all to require it other than a financial one.

True enough, Merk will make billions at least until Cervarix comes out, then Glaxosmithkline will make billions as well. Is the money spent to see a decrease in a particular type of cancer worth it? Much better argument than 'it will make her a floosie'.

Edited, Feb 8th 2007 5:07pm by bodhisattva

I believe mostly because of supplies and cost. Since women are most at risk from the effects of HPV, making them the priority makes the most sense. However, gleaned from the intrawebz and some Washington Post interview...Doesn't seem that there's much reason why it couldn't be given to males.

Edit: from the same interview and something I did not know......which goes back to the point of my first post.

Edited, Feb 8th 2007 9:12am by Jophiel

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll note that the comments from the doctor in my quoted interview seem to indicate that the recommended age bracket is based more on the most probable period of first exposure to HPV vs clinical effectiveness. So I rescind my earlier comments about it. Doesn't change my opinion, but I hate to misinform.

Just for you Althrun

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBUMgpmVHtk

Okay, Bhodi, you hit my hot-button topic of the week. Gbaji-length long post ahead...

Y'know, when this issue first came up, I thought I would be in favor of mandating it. I thought it would be a blow for women's health (which unfortunately STILL gets swept under the rug a great deal of time--the FDA will approve drugs to treat erectile dysfunction, but not for anorgasmia in women, even though there are drugs ALREADY available on the market for other purposes which research has shown would help--the FDA just refuses to approve them for that purpose) and a strike against people who somehow think that things like lack of sex ed and knowledge about how to protect yourself against STIs will somehow prevent the rampant teenage hormones from influencing the behavior of their chaste precious darlings.

Instead, I find myself on the fence. Part of the research I'm doing in preparation for my impending motherhood is educating myself about all the routine vaccines, and I'm not much liking what I'm finding. Last week my reading material for the week was What Your Doctor May Not Tell You About Children's Vaccinations, which was written by a doctor whose practice specializes in treating children who have had adverse reactions to vaccines, and it was really quite an eye-opener. Before reading the book, I knew that somewhere out there there was an argument for delaying vaccinating kids until an older age and foregoing some vaccines altogether, but I didn't really know what that argument was. I knew a vague something about a link between certain vaccines and autism that might or might not have to do with therosol/mercury, but not much.

I knew nothing. Autism isn't the end of the possible complications (and the CDC can say there's never been a "proven" link till they're blue in the face, but when a kid who is developing normally and possibly even ahead of the curve until they get a certain shot within days or weeks of the shot begins REGRESSING developmentally, going from talkative to silent, from well-behaved to uncontrollable, I call bullsh'it.) There are other neurological disorders, learning disabilities, brain inflammation from the pertussis vaccine, autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, diabetes, and that's just the short list.

And the CDC and the FDA cannot be trusted to fairly and honestly evaluate the impact of these drugs. In recent years, a genetically engineered rotavirus vaccine was deemed safe, caused life-threatening intenstinal blockages in a number of children and killed at least one, then was pulled from the market. An inquiry was made into how it got approved in the first place, and what the inquiry found was that the boards which approved it at both the CDC and FDA were loaded with stockholders from the pharmaceutical company that manufactured the drug, people who help patents on vaccines for rotavirus, people who had served on the boards of various pharmaceutical companies, and loads of other people who had documented "conflicts of interest" but were permitted to sit on the panels anyway.

There is also a question of how necessary some of these vaccines are. Take, for instance, the HepB vaccine. Less than one-one hundreth of a percent (0.01%) of children are born to HepB positive mothers. The risk groups for contracting HepB are IV drug users, health care workers, and people who engage in certain unsafe sexual practices. It's NOT very communicable by casual contact (such as would be found in a schoolyard.) Does this SOUND like a disease that a newborn baby or school-age child is at risk for? Then why is the vaccine being given on THE FIRST DAY OF LIFE? The "official" reason is that it's because not all women were being screened for HepB before giving birth. The fact that it's an expensive vaccine that makes the pharmaceutical company and doctors who administer it sh'itloads of cash plays no role at all, I'm sure.

We have vaccines that are still being given for diseases that were eradicated decades ago. We stopped giving the smallpox vaccine when smallpox stopped being a problem, but we're still giving the polio vaccine. Again--why? What's the motivation here for continuing to do this? Is it genuinely an interest in protecting the public health, when these days the vaccine is doing more harm than the disease itself? There's also some question as to whether or not certain vaccines are even necessary--there are epidemiology charts out there that show that some diseases were pretty much already eradicated BEFORE the vaccine hit the market, because the main cause of the disease was poor public sanitation and lowered immunity due to poor public nutrition.

Then there's the whole issue of whether or not some vaccines actually confer lifelong immunity. Some don't, and others we don't know if they do or not, and some of both of those categories do not have required or recommended boosters at intervals. Unfortunately, a lot of these diseases, such as chicken pox (varicella) and measles, are relatively harmless in small children, but extremely dangerous in grown adults. Sure, the vaccine is great for saving parents from having to take time off work to tend their sick kids (this is the selling point the pharmceutical companies that market the varicella vaccine tout) you're trading a benign illness now with resulting lifelong immunity for a not-so-benign illness later.

There's also the problem that the immunization industry is predicated on the idea that infant and early childhood immune systems are capable of mustering up the same sort of response as adult immune systems, so that if you give a dose of a disease, the body will produce immunity to it. Research is showing this is NOT the case, that the infant immune system is still in development and not capable of mustering up that sort of response, and that overloading the developing immune system (sometimes with as much as SIX vaccines in a single day) can actually handicap its development and lead to autoimmune and other immune disorders.

So, at this point I've decided that I'm going to delay vaccinations for at least two years for Ambrya 2.0. The brain does a lot of development during the first two years of life, and other countries which have increased the recommended age for certain vaccines such as MMR and CPT to two years old have seen marked decreases in their autism and SIDs rates. I've decided to bring the kid to my general physician for care instead of trying to find a pediatrician, because in large part, I know my GP is NOT a big fan of immunizations and will support me in delaying or foregoing them. My main concern at this point is the fact that my kid will almost certainly end up going to public school, and thus it will be a battle if I choose to opt out of certain mandatory vaccines. Oregon allows religious and medical exemptions to mandatory vaccines (alas, not philosophical.) While I can't claim a religious exemption, my doctor may be willing to help me get a medical exemption.

Anyway, how does this relate to the Gardasil (and why does that word always remind me of a feminine hygiene product, like yeast infection cream) debate? Well, in as much as I am in favor of a vaccine that SAVES WOMENS LIVES, at this point I see any attempt to make yet ANOTHER vaccine mandatory as an erosion of my ability as a parent to pick and choose what chemicals I am going to allow to be injected into my child's body, and the right to reject them because I don't consider them to be safe for my child.

The religious whackos can still go f'uck themselves, even though I suppose I'm skirting awfully close to their side in this debate.

That's not the plan here. By that time, I'll be working as a midwife, which means I'll be on-call 24 hours a day. That won't allow me any sort of structure in which to home-school my kids. Otherwise, I'd be amenable to the idea since the public school system is going to hell in a handbasket.

Meanwhile, in today's Chicago Tribune...

This is so completely unfunny that you should be hung

I am praying that you get cancer.


Don't worry, Jesus isn't real!

Mrs. Wint - Dat cho?