I try not to include political rants in this journal too often, just because offending people is not high on my list of favorite things to do. But I think this needs addressing.
Hopefully most people by now have heard of Gardasil, the new HPV vaccine produced by the pharmaceutical company Merck & Co. This vaccine has generated some controversy with health officials and parents, especially now that Texas (!?) has made the vaccination mandatory for girls entering 6th grade.
My mom works for a non-profit global health organization in Seattle that had a major part to play in the development in Gardasil as well as the GlaxoSmithKline counterpart due for release in March of this year, Cervarix. She used to head the HPV/Cervical Cancer program at this organization and worked towards distributing the vaccine in developing countries. In short, she knows a lot about the vaccine.
First, I'll start with some facts. A lot of people barely know what HPV is, let alone anything about the vaccine. 500,000 people are infected with HPV annually, and 250,000 die from it in the same amount of time (80% in developing countries). Some 24-20 million people are believed to be infected with HPV. A recent study at the University of Washington found, shockingly, that each time a woman has sex with a new sexual partner her chances of getting HPV rises
thirty percent. In other words, if a woman has three sexual partners in college (not an unusual case at all) she may have a 90% chance of having HPV. In another source I found, it said that HPV has been found 17-49% of female college students.
Many people think that Herpes, Chlamydia, or AIDS are the most common STD's, but they're not. Its HPV.
This new vaccine protects against the strains 16 and 18 of the HPV virus, which cause 70% of cervical cancer cases and
90% of Genital warts cases. I recently went to a University of Washington clinic to receive the first dose of the vaccine (there are three doses, usually two months apart, and it's not cheap), and I was surprised how few side effects there were. It even says that the vaccine is safe for pregnant women! This is because the vaccine is composed of proteins manufactured so that our immune systems react the same way as they would to the specific strains of HPV, even though no actual virus is contained within the vaccine. In other words, this vaccine is
much safer than the flu vaccine (which can result in flu-like symptoms), even though the flu vaccine is widely used and the HPV vaccine is still taboo.
Of course, it's about sex. Because HPV is a sexually transmitted disease, many parents object to vaccinating pre-teen girls, the recommended age group. However, studies have shown that most women are first exposed to HPV during their mid to late teen years--basically, the first time they have sex. According to most studies, I, at 18, am thought to be rather old to be receiving this vaccine as statistically I will have already had sex. Seeing as I haven't yet, I want to get the vaccine before going to college.
I had a nice chortle after watching a debate on Fox News today about this very issue, during which a vaccine opponent basically said that she didn't understand why we needed to vaccinate girls during their early teen years because HPV has a twenty year latent period and the age most women first show symptoms of HPV is between 35 and 40 years old. What? Does she not know basic arithmetic? The idea with this vaccine is to protect girls
before their first sexual experience. I'm sorry to tell worried parents, but if they think their 13, 14, and 15 year old children aren't having sex, they're sorely mistaken. I've recently heard a story from my old middle school that the faculty has taken to patrolling the bathrooms in order to catch students
having sex during class. It's apparently quite a frequent occurrence for these 12, 13, and 14 year olds. Pretty shocking, but reality all the same.
The claim that being vaccinated for an STD will promote sexual promiscuity is akin to saying that wearing seatbelts makes people drive recklessly and get into more accidents. I know from experience that when the average high school student has sex, he or she is not generally worried about STDs, but about pregnancy. And last time I checked there's no vaccine against that. That's all I'm going to say about that ridiculous argument made by some parents, because it doesn't really deserve acknowledgment.
Also, there have been frequent cases of the HPV virus passing through the latex of a condom, so even more commonly practiced methods of contraception aren't as effective as generally thought.
Surprisingly, I'm still not sure how I feel about the mandated vaccination in Texas, simply because as far as I know the governer didn't consult with many people about it and I'm fairly sure he was paid off by Merck. However, I do think that every person with a daughter of the right age should seriously consider getting her vaccinated. It's not a question of your daughter being sexually promiscuous and thus needing the vaccine, it's a question of your daughter having sex
at all during
any time in her life, simply because the chances of contracting HPV during one's first sexual experience is so high.
Above all, it's a vaccine against frickin'
cancer. Anyone sick enough to argue against that has major issues, in my book.
Ugh. I'm tired of typing. Just food for thought.
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