This one is for just about anyone that visits this website:
Does vaccinating your preteen girl with Gardasil promote promiscuity?
We’re sure there’s a lot of people who are on one side of the fence or another. We’d like to hear your opinions for or against this idea of vaccinating preteen girls against human papillomavirus (HPV) and cervical cancer.
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Despite the idiotic rhetoric of conservative nuts, there are a lot of good medical reasons to wait before rushing to mandate a vaccine that was approved less than a year ago based on only two years of clinical results.
For example, the most recently released clinical results are very disappointing.
To summarize this published, peer-reviewed medical journal article:
1. In the FUTURE I trial, GARDASIL demonstrated no clinical efficacy among the general subject population for overall reduction in the rates of grade 2 and grade 3 cervical intraepithelial neoplasia and adenocarcinoma — the only recognized precursors to cervical cancer.
2. In the larger FUTURE II trial, GARDASIL demonstrated no clinical efficacy among the general subject population for overall reduction in the rates of grade 3 cervical intraepithelial neoplasia and adenocarcinoma — the strongest (and many would argue only valid) precursors to cervical cancer.
3. GARDASIL’s protection against cancer associated HPV strains 16 and 18 appears to cause a disproportionate increase in of pre-cancerous dysplasias associated with other HPV strains associated with cervical cancer “raising the possibility that other oncogenic HPV types eventually filled the biologic niche left behind after the elimination of HPV types 16 and 18.”
4. Even if look only at the FUTURE II results (in which for some reason GARDASIL performed better among the general female population), we are talking about just a 17% decrease in all high grade dysplasias — many of which would spontaneously regress without treatment. So we would have vaccinate 129 women (at about $500 for the three shot regimen) to avoid a single, eminently treatable dysplasia. That’s about $60,000 per dysplasia prevented.
This is all directly from the article linked above.
I myself would add that we currently have only 3 years of follow up to go on in terms of both GARDASIL’s safety and efficacy among the 16 to 26 year female population, no data concerning its efficacy among 9 to 12 year old girls and only 18 months of follow up on less than 600 total preteen girls in terms of safety data about GARDASIL within its targeted population.
Also see : The Journal of the American Medical Association and The Wall Street Journal
It appears that the vaccinated cohort sees a 20% increase in high grade cervical dysplasias caused by cancer-associated HPV strains other than HPV 16 and 18. One possible explanation is that HPV 6 or HPV 11 infections are antagonistic to more dangerous HPV infections.