Some good news on the medical front:
An experimental Merck & Co. vaccine completely prevented early-stage cervical cancer and precancerous cervical lesions caused by the two most common forms of a virus linked to such cancers, Merck said on Thursday."This trial confirms that a vaccine can give young women a high level of protection from developing precancerous lesions and early cervical cancers," Laura Koutsky, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington who led the study, told Reuters.
The favorable findings were seen in a late-stage trial sponsored by the U.S. drugmaker, which included more than 12,000 women from 13 countries, aged 16 to 26, who were not infected with either of the virus types when the trial began.
The two forms of human papillomavirus, types 16 and 18, are responsible for an estimated 70 percent of cervical cancer cases, and are the targets of Merck's Gardasil vaccine. Such cancers kill about 300,000 women worldwide each year, including almost 4,000 in the United States, Merck said.
Though who knows if the vaccine will ever actually get to women. The Christian right is doing their best to block the vaccine. Cause it will make you slutty. No, seriously.
You remember back in May, Katha Pollitt had a great piece on this very subject, Virginity or Death! Check out why some folks would rather see you get cancer than the truth:
Christian conservatives have a special reason to be less than thrilled about the HPV vaccine. Although not as famous as chlamydia or herpes, HPV has the distinction of not being preventable by condoms. It's Exhibit A in those gory high school slide shows that try to scare kids away from sex, and it is also useful for undermining the case for rubbers generally--why bother when you could get HPV anyway? In 2000, Congressman (now Senator) Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who used to give gruesome lectures on HPV for young Congressional aides, even used HPV to propose warning labels on condoms. With HPV potentially eliminated, the antisex brigade will lose a card it has regarded as a trump unless it can persuade parents that vaccinating their daughters will turn them into tramps, and that sex today is worse than cancer tomorrow.
Lovely.
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This is a losing issue for fundamentalists, period. When you pass out condoms, kids are going to use them to have sex. When you give young women birth control, they're (more likely than not) going to use it to prevent themselves from getting pregnant when they're having sex. While it's important that kids have access to them when they need them (or even want them) these things are tools which are generally only needed if the kids are having sex, which obviously is not something with which most parents are comfortable. Giving your kid this vaccine, though, is no indication that they are having sex or are about to do it soon, just that they won't get cervical cancer (or any of the other cancers associated with HPV).
Several things about the fundamentalists' opposition to this vaccine get my goat:
- If you are a woman who had extramarital sex, you are a dirty slut who deserves to die horribly of cervical cancer.
- If you saved yourself for marriage but your husband didn't, you could still get HPV from him. I.e., you are still a dirty slut who deserves to die horribly from cervical cancer.
- If your husband cheated on you and gave you HPV, you are obviously a failure as a wife, i.e., you are a dirty slut who deserves to die horribly from cervical cancer.
Excerpt from Marty's Musings at martymusings.blogspot.com
Cervical cancer, which afflicts about 10,000 American women a year and kills nearly 4000, could soon become history. Scientists are testing a vaccine that, so far, is highly effective in preventing infection with the virus that causes most cervical cancer. As Ellen Goodman discovered, this is not welcome news for those who have been using the disease to promote their religious agenda for sexual “purity.”
For the abstinence-only camp, preserving virginity until a proper, traditional marriage is far more important than preventing a deadly disease. Leslie Unruh of the National Abstinence Clearinghouse remarked, “I personally object to vaccinating children against a disease that is 100 percent preventable with proper sexual behavior.” And they'll define what's "proper," thank you very much. The group’s mission is “to promote the appreciation for and practice of sexual abstinence (purity) until marriage through the distribution of age appropriate, factual and medically-referenced materials.” Public health? Disease prevention? Preventing death? Not so much.