HPV, the human papilloma virus, is a sexually transmitted infection which is responsible for 70% of cervical cancer cases. Cervical cancer is the leading cause of death from cancer among women in developing countries, killing 200,000 women each year – 4,000 in the US. It is one of the few things that condoms do not protect against.. So wouldn’t you think that a vaccine against HPV would be universally celebrated? Young people could be vaccinated before they became sexually active and within a generation, cervical cancer could be reduced by 70%.
According to an article in The Nation, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline have both conducted successful trials of a vaccine to prevent HPV.
Not so fast: We’re living in God’s country now. The Christian right doesn’t like the sound of this vaccine at all. “Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful,” Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council told the British magazine New Scientist, “because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex.”
So, they would rather women ran a greater risk of developing cervical cancer than give up a weapon in their anti-sex armoury because that is really what it is about:
Although not as famous as chlamydia or herpes, HPV has the distinction of not being preventable by condoms. It’s Exhibit A in those gory high school slide shows that try to scare kids away from sex, and it is also useful for undermining the case for rubbers generally–why bother when you could get HPV anyway? In 2000, Congressman (now Senator) Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who used to give gruesome lectures on HPV for young Congressional aides, even used HPV to propose warning labels on condoms. With HPV potentially eliminated, the antisex brigade will lose a card it has regarded as a trump unless it can persuade parents that vaccinating their daughters will turn them into tramps, and that sex today is worse than cancer tomorrow
Article here: Virginity or Death!
It’s my understanding that HPV causes all cervical cancer.
it seems to be a figure that is different from different sources: The Nation article mentions 70%, about.com suggests 93%,www.ashastd.org says that only some types of HPV causes cancer.
It’s definitely true that only some HPV types cause cervical cancer. The fact is that the HPV virus causes all human warts, and there are over a hundred varieties. Two dozen or so (I’m not sure about this number) specifically affect the genitals. And among this subset, the variants that cause cervical cancer and the variants that cause genital warts are mutually exclusive. No variant causes both. In fact, one major study about five years ago seemed to show that women who got genital warts never got cervical cancer — it was as if the wart variant acted as a vaccine against the cancer variant.
But I think it’s pretty well established that cervical cancer doesn’t happen without HPV. One big study I read said that HPV was found in 97% of cervical cancer cases, and suggested that the missing 3% was merely due to testing error. In fact, there was even a recent period when people were discussing replacing pap smears with HPV tests, since both are looking for the same thing, but the HPV test is more direct.
This is the most outrageous, disquieting, so totally over the top insanity that I have ever seen. These moronic simpering sycophants, who spout out save the fetus, abandon the child are the worst form of social cancer that I can think of in polite society. The repugs in control of the Kansas Dept of Education are talking about changing the rules for Sex Education in Kansas schools along with changing the curriculum to a more advanced abstinence only program. Now how advanced can abstinence only get, Oh I see, don’t have sex until you are married, don’t have sex outside of your marriage, that is advanced. They are going to change from an OPT out format for sex ed, to an OPT IN, that way if they don’t want their children being given sex education they don’t have to do anything and like in the small town I live, there will be plenty of 13 to 17 year old mothers to contend with in our community.
Now there is a vaccine to protect women “oh women” from this dreadful and fatal disease and the reichwing is going off about not allowing them to be vaccinated because it will promote sexually active behavior. Oh chicken puckey, these people are the most ignorant, ill informed, lazy, degenerates that could have ever been placed on this earth through Great Spirit or evolution or whatever got us on this planet in the first place. Reichwing wingnuts have a special place for women, you know barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen, that way they are not trying to gain their human rights.
Reichwing wingnuts I can only hope will have a very special place for them when they leave this place, I can only hope that it suitable for their just rewards.
THe only thing i could really add to your ‘right on the mark’ comment would be that the ‘Reichwing’ continually makes new lows, just so they can go even lower.
considering the mind set of these ppl, I am not one bit suprised in that. They are really simple minded. As far as I am concerned they really need lots of pysch/social help..we really have a big job ahead of us…
My perception is that the fundamentalists would like to bring back stoning as punishment as well.
Beating wives is okay…pregnancy regardless of health risks to the woman…cancer would be “God’s will” as punishment for promiscuity…see it all fits
snark
.
What snark? It sounds all too real to me.
doesn’t seem to have any problems with the never-ending advertisements for the Viagra type medication. Just keep the pregnant women barefoot in the kitchen. Let’s continue with the 1890’s and remain ignorant. UGH!
Raise your hand if you or anyone YOU EVER MET IN YOUR ENTIRE LIFE have ever abstained because you were afraid of cervical cancer.
Yeah, that’s what I f*cking thought.
Given how little these people are willing to tell their kids about sex, the odds that any of these poor girls are using cervical cancer as a reason to say no are about the same as the odds it will snow tomorrow in Miami. (Bonus points to anyone who catches the J. Leon Holmes reference).
Yeeeaaaaargh.
the way they double thing or what ever they call it, they are saying that just to stay on message, not for real if it happened to them really. I see someof this happening with the republicans locally on things. it actually changes when it happens to them for real…I know thsi is way to serious of an issue to say that on, but maybe that is what they are doing in some aspect
Everything changes when it happens to them.
But in the meantime, they continue to force our kids into school programs that tell them they should be “prepared to die” if they have sex before marriage.
Traumatize them into believing that every normal sexual feeling they have is a lure of Satan, but that the resulting anxiety disorder will magically disappear, sex being washed in the Blood of the Lamb and sanctified by God the second they say “I do.”
Sweet Jesus Christ, why didn’t I become a sex therapist when I had the chance?
The same people that would rather their sinful children die are the same people that would disown their gay/lesbian child. They will justify this by saying their kids deserved their fate. If they were so immoral as to have premarital sex or gay sex, then obviously Satan had stolen their dear ones from them or it was God’s will.
This is a really important point. I can’t remember who wrote it, but someone recently diaried on Kos about a man who was vehemently anti-abortion in public, but admitted privately that his own daughter had had an abortion when she was in high school. ‘It was a special situation’ ‘She had so much potential’ ‘She was taken advantage of by a lying sack of sh*t’ etc. There are exceptions, but generally all bets are off when you’re talking about your own kid. Your kid made a mistake – everyone else’s kid is lazy or dumb or a whore.
The people pushing this thing don’t want their own kids to die from cervical cancer. As people talk about elsewhere on the thread, what they want is to control society by controlling sex. They will make a special exception for their kid because their kid is a person – the other kids are just pawns in a power play.
The diarist said that the man had come into a bookstore, and the two of them struck up a conversation.
The same thing happens at our clinic all the time, and not only with parents.
It’s nothing unusual for a woman to say, “All those other women out there in the waiting room, they make me sick, because they’re just using it (they never will say the “A” word) for birth control. But in my circumstances it’s different, because I don’t have any other choice.”
And what are her oh-so-extra-special circumstances, the ones that make having an abortion not only OK, but absolutely necessary only for her? Why, she was taking the pill, but got pregnant anyway.
Yep, that’s some pretty ding-dang special circumstances, all right, really unique. We might have two rape victims in the house that day, or one patient on dialysis and another with breast cancer–but even though she knows no more about their personal reasons for having an abortion than they know of hers, none of them qualifies as a real, living, breathing, laughing, crying woman who’s doing the best she can.
Only her.
that as HPV becomes endemic in younger women, as it seems to be on the verge of doing in some tested populations, they will begin to develop natural defenses against it.
Last fall I saw a Lancet article on Medscape hinting at that possibility.
If it proves to be the case that younger women are beginning to fight off HPV infection on their own, the Talibangelists doubtlessly will be crushed to lose another Scourge of God for smiting the unchaste.
While the rest of us will give eternal thanks never to see another 15 year-old vagina half-obstructed by condyloma again.
Anyone who would condemn a child to that by withholding HPV vaccine should have yet another circle of hell constructed for them alone.
To this kind of power mad religious extremist lunatics, women have also been expendable, period. Rib clones. We were expendable assets back in my day, and that’s exactly where they want to take us again.
Bottom line is this. If you can control womens sexuality and reproduction, you can control society, AND also have pleanty of unpaid, socially sanctioned slaves to serve your every need.
Been there, done that. No fun at all.
THat sure as hell’s been my own experience. It could also explain why homosexual’s, trans people, intersexual, and anyone else out of the sexual mainstream are not tolerated. It’s sex they can’t control.
..uh..that should be “women are ALWAYS expendable”
marriage, but please sign up for a little stint in the tropical paradise of Iraq.
Sure is some weird shit going on these days.
Back in the day, when I decided to get off the Pill for a while and went to Planned Parenthood, I was placed in a group of other women, mostly white, who were looking to get on prophylactics. With the PP rep, we were to find out what kinds of BC was available and to talk briefly about our sexual experience with BC, and find out what was right for us.
I swear, most of these women–single, from 18-24 years old–said that they had already gotten pregnant up to three times. They had aborted or had a child(ren) and felt it was finally time to obtain birth control. I was appalled.
Because to me, from day one, abortion is a last resort when the BC fails, not because you may be too lazy or willfully ignorant or afraid about what is out there.
Sure enough, they admitted that they didn’t want to use BC because it would have alerted parents that they were sexually active, or didn’t want to use BC thinking they were going to marry the guy…all sorts of reasons, but the right one. I will say, some of these young women were shy or embarrassed telling their histories; they did not meet people’s eyes, and they colored up almost to the roots of their hair. We didn’t have to use our last names in the session.
I was pretty boring; hadn’t had an abortion. Waited until I was out of my mother’s house and in college and took the pills for six months before I decided to finally take the leap. And took an additional pill that night to make sure I didn’t get preggers.
Which makes we wonder now about access to prophylactics and how the Reichwing (love that word) at the pharmacies want to keep women from filling prescriptions for BC devices and pills because they are somehow killing babies with these things.
So if I read of someone like Bridget Maher complaining that getting a vaccine against cervical cancer is giving a green light to those who want to jump each other’s bones, I’m just going, you dingbat, but they’re already doing it. Without BC. Without protection. Without the right information. Without their parents knowing until the kid comes up with a STD. Et cetera. Et cetera. Etc.
Is there legislation under consideration? Is this a Federal or a State issue? Is there a government organization that is responsible for legislating or mandating vaccinations? Or is this something that is left up to individual doctors?
I have to admit I know nothing about how vaccinations are controlled or legally compelled, but I find it difficult to believe that a religious group could prevent people who want the vaccine or doctors who want to prescribe it from doing so.
Maybe this is an instance where the corporate greed of the insurance companies could work in our favor. If the insurance companies know that giving women a vaccine could illiminate 70% of cervical cancer cases, and therefore save them from having to pay for expensive treatment, wouldn’t they be all for that? Perhaps the most expedient way to get action on this is to lobby the insurance companies.