GARDASIL (HPV) vaccination for teenage girls? what to do?

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Ticker, I don't want to use the "they really don't care about their children" thing. Even my mother cared about me. She just couldn't pull her head out from wherever she kept it.

It is really hard to adequately educate people.

I feel very strongly about this and I'm sure plenty of people will disagree or just ignore me. I stopped getting the annual paps after my son was born. I was busy (very busy) and overwhelmed. Then we moved and didn't have health insurance. This year we got it again and when I went for my physical and pap, I discovered I not only had HPV, but pre cancerous lesions.
So, anyone wants to pooh pooh the cervical cancer rates, go ahead. That's mortality to cervical cancer. It doesn't address the precancer growths, genital warts and cancer treatments. The actual numbers of infected women are unknown, they believe anywhere between 70-90% of all women have HPV. You can have it for years and test negative for it. So, don't go for that blaming "promiscuous" people crap. I've been monogamous for 11+ years and I got it. I don't even think you can have men tested for HPV.
I had a painful biopsy and then a painful sugical procedure to get rid of the lesions and I will have to be monitored for a while. Even with excellent insurance coverage it still took several hundreds of dollars to pay for it. It costs just over $3000 for the procedures.

I would vaccinate to prevent this.

Thanks for clarifying that...

The whole thing just does not sit right with me. How can we be absolutely sure that our young girl children don't have a strain of HPV? Maybe even transmitted from mom when they where pregnant? Afterall, we don't test for HPV because it is too "expensive" or some other BS, instead we just screen for Cervical Cancer with PAPS. Most people with HPV never know they have it...

Edit: hmm... maybe you do test in the states, generally in Canada we don't...

Women that show no abnormal Paps are not tested for HPV until 30 or so. It was explained to me that testing for HPV is redundant because it's so common.

you can't get autism from a vaccine. If you don't want her to get cervical cancer, you should probably get them to give her an HPV vaccine since HPV can cause cervical cancer.

How can anyone tell the cause of a cancer that hits one person in 30,000?

I thought the cancer rate was much higher, it is just that it actually KILLS one in 30,000.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cervical_cancer

The numbers look more like this:

"Worldwide, cervical cancer is the fifth most frequent cancer in women, when ordered by number of deaths [27]. Cervical cancer affects about 16 per 100,000 women per year and causes death in about 9 per 100,000 per year."

That's more like 1 in 10,000 dying and one in about 6,600 affected.

And the reason why the mortality rates seem low is that cervical cancer is very slow moving, which means most women (that receive health care) are able to avoid "cancer" by having their precancerous lesions removed. As I said I did. It's still a surgical procedure, it was still costly and it was still painful.

Nine out of 16 is an uncomfortably high mortality rate, about 55 percent. One thing that they don't tell you is that precancerous lesions and even cancerous tumors often come and go unnoticed. We only have statistics for what was found by doctors.

Well, as you said, 9 out of 16 is pretty high for when actual "cancer" is detected. I would think that it only makes sense to remove the "precancerous leasion" for this very reason, even if it may by its own accord disapear!

As far as from the scientific perspective, this vaccination only went through 1100 trials before it was released (which for a vaccine is VERY small numbers). Basically, it is being pushed right now I suspect because the nation is now the second round of guinea pigs, with Texas obviously as the biggest group of subjects. That is a big red flag. For myself, I would not get this vaccination until it has spent a good many years on the market with no unwanted side effects having cropped up.

Frankly, I think vaccines can be a good thing. However, I don't trust drug companies or the FDA regulators, so for safety sake, autism vaccination debate aside, don't get her the vaccination. At least wait some years. If she practices abstinence, she has no need to worry until that time anyways.

The Govenor of Texas, Rick Perry, received generous PAC donations from the the pharmaceutical company who makes this particular vaccine. Mr. Perry is solely responsible for mandating this vaccine at the behest of the Texas legislature. He is clearly in bed with the pharmaceutical company, and has completely ignored the civil rights of his constituents.

That being said, I believe there is a place for vaccinations in our society, but only AFTER they have been fully tested for their safety in the short and long term, AND deemed medically necessary. Regardless if 1 in 30,000 contracts cervical cancer or dies from it, what is the risk of exposing that same 30,000 to a vaccine that no one really knows how it will help or harm in the future?

I agree. The science so far is shaky and the Texas governor has clearly not acted with the best interest of his state in mind; he has acted instead at the behest of his bank account.

This is corruption and bribery. I bet that the animal rights organizations also donated to Mr. Perry's campaign and that's another reason that Texas is messed up.

Never ever trust a company that bribes a government official.

You cannot test a guy for it. In men, the site of infection is the only place where they can get a sample, and the site is invisible except in the few strains which cause warts, which can be extremely small and go unnoticed. So at least 90% of the guys who have it will be asymptomatic and untestable, and they make up 2/3 of the adult male population.

The reason only about 5,000 American women will die of it this year is because pap smears result in close to half of all cases being caught before they get to the cancerous stage, and a significant percentage of the cancer cases being detected early. Worldwide, the incidence rate and the mortality rate are twice as high. Any woman who misses her checkups for a few years can easily become one of the unfortunate 5,000.

Worldwide it is the 5th most common cancer among women (8th in the US), but differs from the others in that it is at least 99% preventable through vaccination. If other fairly common cancers could be prevented in the same way, I would get those inoculations for my kids as well. I've watched one relative die of cancer, and one was more than enough.

Abstinence is no guarantee, because it's transmissable without sexual contact. I know of a woman who got it from a towel which an infected person had used. Since 3/4 of adults have it, your kids might already have been exposed through casual contact. Have any of them ever used your towel?

If you look back to the 1600s-1800s, when venereal diseases were untreatable, often fatal (in the case of "the pox" -- syphilis), there was no safe and effective birth control, and birth out of wedlock was extremely stigmatised, the rate of conception out of wedlock was still higher than it is now. People simply do not stay abstinent, even in the face of dire threats.

So I can't get behind trying to use fear of a completely preventable disease as the method of first choice. Aside from its unreliability as a disease prevention technique, as a method of trying to coerce kids into making certain lifestyle choices, history points in the direction of failure. And I'm not interested in trying to force particular decisions onto my kids, even if I thought that it would work. Virtue is in freely choosing right over wrong, and they can't do that if they're terrorized into thinking that there are no choices to be made.