HPV vaccine (reminded by pegkerr)

[mrissa]

pegkerr reminded me that I've been thinking about the HPV vaccine. The Strib ran an article Sunday talking about parents not wanting to get their daughters vaccinated, in case it gave them the idea that it was okay to have sex. This is just one of the articles I've read recently.

And I very quickly became very, very upset at this. What I said over at Peg's was: I was upset nearly to tears over the article in the Strib about this on Sunday. If it was doubts about the safety of the vaccine, I'd have to look at the data, but that's not what these people were saying. It boiled down to, "I wouldn't want to save my daughter's life if it meant she might have sex I disapproved of." Or even, "I wouldn't want to save my daughter's life if she was raped by the wrong person." I very quickly lose the ability to discuss this attitude rationally.

Seriously and in specific now that I have the article in front of me: Debra Blaschko, 47, of Mankato, is quoted as saying, "It's not that my kids can't make a mistake. But I want them to strive for the ideal." So to sum up: it's not that her kids can't make a mistake, it's that they should die if they do. Or if they marry someone who once made a sexual choice she wouldn't approve of. Or...etc. You can think of the situations yourself, I'm sure: all the ways in which the children -- the daughter, as men rarely get cervical cancer -- of Debra Blaschko, 47, of Mankato, could behave exactly as she instructed them and still benefit from this vaccine. And then there's the fact that no kid ever behaves exactly as their parents instructed them, because they are their own people with their own choices.

This is not what we call loving parenting.

At pegkerr's, I chose to use the icon with my dad in it, like I'm doing here, and went on to say: My dad was pretty traditionally daddy-protective when I started dating, but I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that that protective behavior was -- is -- about my whole person and what he hoped would make me healthy and happy, not about control. I wish every kid could say the same. (The same is true of my mom, except that she wasn't the one who got dating-protective.)

Comments

[zalena.livejournal.com]

A lot of people have been posting about the HPV vaccine. It seems that responses on both sides of the issues are threaded with hyperbole.

According to the National Cancer Institute, "In more than 90 percent of cases, the infections are harmless and go away without treatment." The vaccine targets four variants of the virus, two linked to genital warts, two linked to cervical cancer.

I would definitely take issue with the statement in the Strib article that ALL cervical cancers are caused by HPV. Where did they find that information? I also think stating that it is a "vaccine that will prevent death" is overstating the benefits of the vaccine. All of us will die someday, and it seems to me that use of seatbelts is a more effective and less expensive method of reducing the mortality rate among teenagers.

A vaccine is definitely a positive development, but not being vaccinated hardly seems to be a death sentence. Too many of the current news articles either deal with culture war issues relating to virginity, or with the projected financial rewards for the vaccine industry.

There are plenty of other vaccines that people avoid due to religious conviction. Luckily, it is the nature of vaccinations to protect not only the vaccinated, but a larger segment of the population from infection.

Now, when are they going to develop an HPV test for men?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No, not every woman who gets HPV gets cervical cancer, and not every woman who gets cervical cancer dies of it. And no, the vaccine wouldn't cover every strain of HPV. But if we had a vaccine that would prevent a large number of the cases of any one kind of cancer, why on earth should we not use it? It doesn't have to make people immortal or knock out a disease that kills 80% of the population in order to be meaningful. I'm not in the population that would directly benefit from this -- too old -- but if I could get a vaccine that would vastly decrease the odds that I would get, say, breast cancer, you'd better believe I'd take it. A vaccine against heart disease? Sign me up. You don't have to believe that the HPV vaccine makes you invincible -- in fact, I've never seen anyone who has -- to think it's a good thing. And the people who are against the vaccine have no way of knowing that their daughters wouldn't be the ones who died of the cervical cancer. There's no reason to think they would be special that way.

This is not the same crowd as the people who believe that God doesn't want them to vaccinate their children against measles. They're not saying that vaccination in general is wrong, and from that I would suspect that the kids in question have had, for example, their MMR vaccines. It's a larger group than that. And if they convince enough people that their teenage daughters will go have eeeeeevil filthy sex if they get this vaccine, then it won't protect the larger segment of the population.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think it's a larger group than just "vaccines are evil," though. Because if they meant that all vaccines were evil, I think they would have said so. Some of the people who don't want the HPV vaccine for their kids are opposed to vaccines in general, but I expect that there are many more who only oppose them for diseases about which they can moralize (even if a lot of the moralizing is inaccurate as well as wrong).

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

There is an anti-vaccination subculture that refuses all vaccinations for children. The people objecting to HPV vaccine are not the same people.