Today, in Disgusting Actions of the Religious Right...

[eruthros]

We have this.

Of course! Vaccinating for an STD that kills 3,500 American women a year is basically telling girls to go out and have sex before marriage! Why didn't I think of that? (Also, does this mean that vaccinating for rabies encourages people to go out and be bitten by dogs?)

I just. I mean, I understand the issues parents can have with the concept of sex and their children. But ... cervical cancer. (And anyway you could get HPV from your husband, too. I mean, 80% of adults have been infected with HPV at at some point in their lives.)

Le sigh. It's a sad thing when I see people agitating for mandatory vaccines and think "oh, well, I guess that's to prevent parents from endangering their children by refusing to get it." Yeeesh.

Comments

[isilya]

Right, and let's not forget the rape and incest victims that make up a high percentage of HPV sufferers. Ideally, we want to try and eradicate HPV, like smallpox. The only way to do that is with mandatory vaccination. Anything else is ridiculous, particularly because the vaccine is so safe.

But seriously, screw the rich Western countries with their moral debates anyway. If you have HPV in a Western country and it progresses to cervical cancer, you have a) a lot of safeguards before it reaches that point and b) a lot of treatment options. What we need to do is get this vaccine out to second and third world countries where cervical cancer is the number one killer of women.

[eruthros]

No, totally -- it's the places where people don't get regular pap smears that this is a real problem. And I hope that the vaccine gets widely, widely distributed -- I mean, cervical cancer kills an approximate 200,000 women yearly, or something, and the if the vaccine performs as in clinical trials that could all be eliminated.

I wasn't going to bring up rape and incest, because I have this notion that the fundamentalist Christian family groups don't really think of them as things that happen to Christian girls who are raised well. (Which, if true, is a whole 'nother example of what's wrong there.) It's still a good point, though, for the pro-vaccine side; people don't just get HPV through consensual sex.