Reply #104: As one of very few women over 30 without HPV....

[politicat]

WARNING: medical discussion of sex below. You're warned.


Dammit, every girl needs this. HPV can be caught easily. It takes genital contact -- including oral sex, non-penatrative sexual contact and other "sensual alternatives" to heterosexual intercourse. It is an epidemic. 20 million people in the US are infected at any given time. 1-3% will develop an HPV related cancer, and the virus itself can cause other issues, including perinatal transmission and adult transmission, as well as respiratory illnesses. (Compare this to the HIV/AIDS Epidemic with about 900,000 active cases at any given time.) It affects women, primarily, but men can and do get cancerous HPV infections. Most anal cancers and most non-tobacco related oral and throat cancers are HPV related. And 80% of women will be infected with HPV by age 50. If that's not an epidemic, there ain't no sich creature. (Sources: CDC, NIH cited via wikipedia.)

Second, I don't have a dog in this race -- no kids -- but I do not have the right to deny protection from anyone, and a teenager is more vulnerable to this and all STDs than I am. This STD is much easier to catch than say HIV or syphilis; the protein shell of HPV is tougher than the protein shell of HIV or the spirochete, meaning that it can linger and survive outside the body for longer and in more adverse conditions. HPV can survive for a few hours on a doorknob, for instance, while HIV dies within minutes and the spirochete can't survive at all. Doorknob. Public restroom. (If you ever needed a reason to wash your hands both before and after you used the toilet, there you go.)

HPV transmission is not prevented by condoms or dental dams the same way that HIV transmission is. That's because HPV can flourish on places that the condom/dam doesn't cover and can be transmitted by touch. A girl does not have to be sexually active in terms of intercourse to get an HPV infection... a heavy make-out session can transmit HPV from one person to another, and non-heterosexuality is no insurance policy, either. HPV is much more like the common cold than HIV is. HPV is endemic, and can kill the same way that colds are endemic and can kill... when they turn into pneumonia or open a person to an opportunistic virus or bacterial infection. Thinking about an HPV vaccine in the same way as thinking about an HIV vaccine is erroneous. This is much more like the MMR, polio or variola or varicella vaccines -- it takes a common and sometimes deadly disease out of circulation the same way that the MMR took measles, mumps and rubella mostly out of circulation.

Merck is going to make a lot of money from this. I'm perfectly happy with this. It's a vaccine against CANCER. Where there's one, there will be another, if there is an incentive to do more research. That comes from people buying the vaccines. Eventually, there will be a generic version, and that will bring the costs down.

This vaccine is really not that different than the polio vaccine. The polio vaccine was not tested on children because that's neither legal nor ethical. It is not legal to test a vaccine on children. It has to go through adult testing first, then it can be administered to children. Polio went through the same process. So did the chicken pox vaccine.

I don't like Governor Goodhair, but on this one, he's doing the right thing, even if for the wrong motives. Yes, Merck's going to make money hand over fist. But Goodhair is going to take this one on the chin from his conservative supporters and no amount of Merck money is going to win that back for him. And incidentally, he's going to save about 88,000 women. (Women run a 1 in 117 lifetime chance of cervical cancer, which is about double the rate of ovarian cancer.)

As for your situation...(Personal generalized opinion to follow...) I don't think it is fair or right or loving for a parent to expose their child to disease through either negligence or will. It's not the parent's body. The parent is only responsible for it for 18 years, and if a parent fails to take care of it during that time, s/he/they are depriving the child of the right to make her own decisions in the other 60 years she is likely to have. I don't think it is ever right for a parent's views to *permanently* impact a child's life and body. (Thus, I do not believe that Jehovah's Witnesses or Christian Scientists have the right to deprive their children of appropriate medical care or Amish parents to deprive their children of education because they're forcing a religious decision on another person without that person's informed consent.) Our duty as adults to children is to protect them from what we can in the face of the best evidence we see. The best evidence is that women are at significant lifetime risk from this virus and are likely to be exposed to this virus despite their best efforts to not be exposed. The only time to prevent exposure is before any incidence of sexual behavior with another person. Women run a far higher risk of cervical cancer than they do an adverse reaction from a vaccine (one in 117 versus one in 10,000). I could not deny my daughter that basic level of protection.