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

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

This is not what we call loving parenting.

Amen.

I see the HPV Vaccine as being in the same category as putting sunscreen on your kid to reduce her skin cancer risk.

We're signing LMH up for it as soon as she's old enough to get it.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

The anti-HPV vaccine people seem to me one uncomfortably small logical step away from the female circumcision people.

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

Yes, I agree completely. I think this HPV business shows the anticontraception crowd up for what it is--it's all about being punished for having sex, whether it's by a pregnancy, by AIDS, or by cancer. Generally, both the pro- and anti- positions around any of the sexually charged political issues (abortion, gay marriage, etc.) seem to have bought into the punishment idea. They are either arguing that people should experience "consequences" of their actions, or they are arguing that people should be free of "consequences". My own two cents is what if these are not "consequences". What if they are just things that happen? Could we deal with them on their own terms and not try make them into a personal morality tale?

My big question about HPV is why aren't boys supposed to be getting it? I think the shape of this debate would be greatly changed if the vaccine were recommended for both boys and girls, or even for boys only. I'll bet that those same sanctimonious parents who want their daughters to die if they have sex with the wrong person would be more than happy to protect their son from a sexually transmitted virus that he caught from a "bad girl" so he can't give it to his wife. Me, I say vaccinate them all--boys, girls, everybody. If a new strain of HPV evades the vaccine, we can make more.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Or having her wear a seatbelt.

"It's not that I don't think my kid could make any mistakes behind the wheel. I just don't want wearing a seatbelt to encourage her to think she can drive too fast or cut in front of other drivers. And if she did, I'd stand dry-eyed at her funeral and say, well, better a dead kid than a bad driver. Also I lack the imagination to come up with any traffic problems that wouldn't be directly the fault of my kid being bad."

See what I mean about getting upset about this?

(Standard disclaimers about the safety of the vaccine and its delivery medium do apply: if problems with the vaccine itself turn up, that's a different thing to be complaining about. That's like making sure the airbag will save rather than crushing your kid, instead of objecting to the idea of airbags.)

[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]

See this, folks? This is the designated conservative on my friendslist. (Not the only one. But still: definitely not a liberal.) Because this isn't a liberal vs. conservative issue, it's a decent parenting issue.

One of the letters to the editor in New Scientist this year suggested that HPV might be able to live in the skin around one's cuticles -- yes, on the fingers. Which makes all the moralistic posturing look even dumber, if that was possible.

I don't know -- I'm not sure that the people who aren't concerned with their daughters would be concerned with their daughters-in-law. I know my parents-in-law don't want me to die of cervical cancer (or any other kind!) through any mechanism, but they don't want seagrit to, either.

I agree that vaccinating everybody looks like it might be a good solution overall, but frankly if we don't have enough for everybody everybody right away, starting with the people who bear the major burden of the disease seems sensible to me, and then expanding the program to boys once we've got it entrenched enough and manufacturers producing enough vaccine and so on.

[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.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

>So to sum up: it's not that her kids can't make a mistake, it's that they should die if they do.

My first thought on hitting that part of the article was very, very similar. I think it's probably not what she means, but...

It's not that I don't think that actions should have consequences. It's just, I'd rather have those consequences be things that people can learn from and move on.

[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).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly. Proportionate consequences. And proportionate consequences that actually hit the person who made the choice, within an appreciable time. If someone makes a choice in high school that means that her future-ex-boyfriend's future wife has to have a hysterectomy or worse in her 30s or 40s, that's not really much of a learning experience.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Or the C19th doctors who didn't tell women that their husbands had given them syphilis, and that was the reason why their babies kept dying and they didn't feel well: because it might have destroyed matrimonial harmony.

[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.

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

But we still have a double standard. Even among very conservative Christians, it's somewhat more acceptable for a man to have premarity sex than a woman. You're right that if there is not enough vaccine to go around, it might make sense to give it only to girls. On the other hand, although this intuitively makes sense, it may not be the best way to ration the vaccine. You can model these things on computers, and if you ran all the parameters, it might turn out that vaccinating *boys* only would result in fewer cervical cancers ten or fifteen years from now because men on average have more partners than women, and can spread the virus more widely.

[mellificent.livejournal.com]

This is also not a subject on which I can be very rational. My father (who was not always the most faithful husband in the world) gave HPV to my mother, who later came down with cervical cancer. A little post-divorce gift.

What I want is to shake these mothers until their teeth rattle, actually. Or make them take the same radiation treatments that my mother had to have. Maybe then they'll get it in their heads that this is not just something theoretical.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

(crossposting the same comment I wrote at pegkerr's, because I think it's important to say this widely.)

I had cervical cancer.

(Removed as a noninvasive CIN III dysplasia 14 years ago, no further symptoms. No way to tell if it was caused by HPV, but the statistics say it's probable.)

I'm making this point here because I knew of no one else who'd had it when I got it, then after my cryosurgery (in-office procedure) I was astonished to find out how many of my friends had had similar surgery. I'm making this point because I think too often cervical cancer is perceived as something someone else gets. (Someone dirty, sleazy and promiscuous, no doubt.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Good reason to model the thing on computers, then.

[(Anonymous)]

I've had -- that I know of -- two cousins, a family friend, and an acquaintance from childhood with cervical cancer. So it looks pretty much like "our kind of people" to me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Lj auto-logging-out: that was me again.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Thanks - precisely my point. ANd if you figure in that it's not the sort of thing most people bring up in casual conversation, the number is quite likely higher.