The CDC study of teens showing a quarter to have already contracted an STD, implying that THREE MILLION teenage girls are infected, is sensational alright. It’s also five years old, extrapolates from an incredibly small sample of girls who’d been treated only by public health services, and offers a skewed result to be sure. Who would foist upon us such a canard? (Merck) And why now? (Gardasil)
HPV is to STD, as a wart is to Leprosy. What outrageous fear mongering all because a pharmaceutical giant wants to mandate its vaccine on all girls aged nine. Gardasil is of dubious efficacy and had proved to be a risk in its own right, so it hasn’t been catching on as Merck had first hoped. The State of Texas has made it obligatory because its governor, a Republican (on the take), bypassed the state legislature to do it. Merck is now lobbying to require their product nationwide. An American populace frightened for its little girls will give our lawmakers the cover they need.
Looking into HPV and cervical cancer prevention, even annual pap smears appear to be excessive medical procedures. What I couldn’t learn anywhere, is whether Greek immigrant Dr. Papanicolaou, inventor of the Pap Test, was only by coincidence studying the Papillomavirus. Or was HPV named after him, his father, or yours?
I’m amazed at your comments, Eric. There is no plot by the CDC here and HPV is well known by the entire medical field to be responsible for upwards of 250,000 deaths (low figure) of women world wide each year from cervical cancer. Plus, it is also known world wide that pap smears have been able to reduce these deaths significantly.
Why on earth would you and Marie be opposed to a vaccine, or other procedures like the pap smear, that can significantly reduce exposures and outright deaths to this cancer? You call the HPV vaccine all a pharmaceutical company plot, too, like such a simplistic statement can somehow just automatically substitute for any facts in the matter!
I am no fan at all of the pharmaceutical companies nor of the CDC, but you two are just way off base with this stuff, as you were , too, Eric, when briefly this site put up a bunch of nonsense about HIV being supposedly all a big plot! The material claimed that HIV did not cause AIDS! You took that offline quickly after complaint, but then this stuff pops onto the screen today??? Why this addiction to plot theories I might ask?
Far from being a bad and/or dated CDC study behind the statistics about the number of teens with STDs, many other studies bare out the extent of the problem, and not just in the US, but worldwide. Up to 80% of American women have contacted some strain of HPV by the time they reach 50. Do you doubt this number, too?
Plus, all across the world, doctors are pushing for this vaccine for HPV to be given. Countries across Europe are implementing vaccination programs with this vaccine, and Third World companies are demanding it, too, and are asking that the price of buying this vaccine be lowered. That’s where there really is a plot, Eric. The companies don’t want the price to be lowered, and therefore their profits from it lowered. But the vaccine is something needed, and needed world wide and not just in the US.
It is just plain wrong to block a child from getting this vaccine, just as they should be getting the vaccine to prevent bacterial meningitis, too. And why we are on this type of nuttiness, yes, the water needs to be fluorinated, too. It’s not all a big plot that needs to be stopped.
Just because the Republican governor of Texas is pushing for this HPV vaccine (to take people’s minds off his destruction of CHIP) is no reason to knee jerk and be against this vaccine. Even the nuts at The Gazette here in The Springs occasionally take positions on issues where they are right, though usually for all the wrong reasons. The multi-national big med pushers are wrong about a lot of things, but this is not one of the times. This vaccine is needed.
Tony, I’m not accustomed to seeing you willingly swallow such a huge amount of bullshit. Maybe Merck can put you on the company payroll.
And, no, the water doesn’t need to be fluoridated. Dead wrong on all counts.
Quote your sources and I’ll gladly go toe to toe with you on this one. Name-calling isn’t going to cut it where our daughters’ health is concerned, so Just the Facts, Sir.
Here is the WHO website about HPV and the need to fight this virus worldwide because it causes cervical cancer, Marie. This campaign is hardly an American plot coming from the American CDC, or one coming merely from a nasty pharmaceutical company either.
http://www.who.int/hpvcentre/en/index.html
I think it laughable your comments about me being on the Merck payroll and ‘swallowing bullshit’. This whole campaign against this vaccine is part of a Right Wing campaign that fears that vaccinating young women against a STD that causes cancer is somehow promoting ‘immorality’. That’s the real bullshit here.
Don’t ‘swallow’ it now, and this has type of campaign against any change has been a fetish of the Right Wing moralists since ancient times even. In their eyes prevention on anything dealing with sex equals immorality. Pure bullshit.
A 26% STD rate in a sample of the size used in the study predicts with 95% confidence that the actual STD rate in the total population is between 23% and 29%.
The ability of small samples to accurately predict total population proportions is a well established mathematical fact. FWIW, I was required to personally prove that fact from first principles when I was a mathematics major in college.
This is not a study done by a corporate shill. This is a study done with a nationally representative random sample by the Center for Disease Control which is one of the least corrupt agencies in government, which is run by scientists in a scientific manner, and has monitored this data annually, using essentially the same methodology, since long before Gardisil was a twinkle in a pharma company researcher’s eye.
The STD rate in high risk populations, such as teenged girls in juvenile detention, is several times as high.
Oh Willeke! That’s the representative sample you get when you only swab Nappy Headed Hos.
Imus, you are a dumb pig.