Before you say anything else about Gardisal, you should do

[hedgehog]

some Googling. If I went to the proper sites, about 63,000 American women are diagnosed with cervical cancer each year, compared to about 210,000 with breast cancer. Cervical cancer has about a 70% survival rate, but treatment can include radiation. chemotherapy, total hysterectomy and possible removal of lymph nodes.

[Breeze54]

1. Ten reasons why HPV vaccine is 'murky' issue

Ten reasons why HPV vaccine is 'murky' issue

http://www.kpcnews.com/articles/2007/02/05/the_news_sun/features/opinion/our_view/ourview2-4.txt

Here are 10 reasons why we are skeptical about efforts to mandate for school girls the HPV vaccine against the sexually transmitted cervical-cancer virus.

10. Merck and Co. (the manufacturer of the vaccine) has funneled money through Women in Government, an advocacy group made up of female state legislators around the country.

9. Sen. Connie Lawson, the General Assembly's No. 1 advocate for the vaccine, is a member of Women in Government.

8. A top official from Merck's vaccine division sits on Women in Government's business council.

7. Women in Government President Susan Crosby, a former Indiana state legislator, said the vaccine could "eliminate a cancer." Yet Gardasil, is NOT a cancer vaccine. It is a vaccine for a virus; specifically for four of the more than 100 types of HPV, two of which cause 70 percent of cervical cancer in women, and two that cause 90 percent of genital warts.

6. Merck could generate billions in sales if Gardasil - at $360 for the three-shot regimen - were made mandatory across the country. Depending on how many girls are Medicaid-eligible in each state, much of that money could come from Medicaid dollars - even if the vaccine is recommended, not mandated.

5. The top 10 leading killers of women in the U.S. are heart disease, stroke, lung cancer (more than 70,000 deaths of women per year), respiratory diseases, Alzheimer's, breast cancer, diabetes, accidents, flu/pneumonia and colon cancer. About 3,700 U.S. women die of cervical cancer each year; that is about 1/8th of the number of women who die from colon cancer, the No. 10 killer of U.S. women.

4. Because the vaccine was only studied for 3 1/2 years, the long-term effectiveness and safety of this vaccine has yet to be determined. It took years for thalidomide and Vioxx (also a Merck product) to demonstrate their most negative side effects.

3. Pap smears have dramatically reduced cervical cancer deaths in the U.S. But Gardasil does not protect against all cancers of the cervix. If the number of Pap smears go down because of women's false sense of security, the number of cervical cancer deaths could go UP!

2. Scarce health care dollars should be spent in the most effective way possible. We believe an investment of billions could be better spent in efforts to battle the top 10 killers of women. (See No. 6 and No. 5.)

1. With an issue as "murky" as this, our little girls should not be guinea pigs.

[TwilightZone]

3. Re: #5 - I'm not sure I understand your reasoning

Are you saying that we shouldn't pursue it because "only" 3,700 women a year die from cervical cancer?

It would seem to me that anything that can potentially save thousands of lives - not to mention the thousands of others who may get it and *not* die from it, but go through chemo, radiation, medication, etc., to deal with it - is worth pursuing.

Edit: typo

[hedgehog]

4. Let's take a look at your arguments:

10, 9 8 and 6: boil down to suggesting that if Merck makes money and/or aggressively markets this, it must be bad. Bribery is bad, but it doesn't tell us anything about the vaccine.

#7: is a matter of semantics. OK, maybe this vaccine won't eliminate cancer, but eliminating 70% of cancer is a good start.

# 5 and #2: cervical cancer is not the main killer of women. OK, so we should ignore the stuff we can prevent until we can cure the hard stuff?

#3: Pap smears have reduced cancer deaths. Note that women are still getting cancer and that the treatment can be nasty. Also, women are instructed to continue getting pap smears. This argument is a variation of the fundy argument that if girls get the vaccine, they'll go wild! If women get the vaccine - they'll never see the doctor again!

#4: the vaccine is new. True, but it has been studied for years and vaccine technology has advanced in the thirty some years since the Swine flu fiasco. Ask some older mothers if they wish now they had waited back in the 50's when the Salk polio vaccine came out. My mother remembers when hospitals used to roll out the iron lungs every summer. Gosh, we really should have waited 10 or 20 years to check out the long term effects of the polio vaccine!

#1: our little girls should not be guinea pigs. Whose little girls should be, then? How would you propose testing this vaccine?

[KoKo]

2. Okay...then go to THIS SITE after you go to Yours:

http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:IUjapgm6f8QJ:www.sourcewatch.org/index.php%3Ftitle%3DMerck+Merck+involved+with+lawsuits+from+failed+drugs&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=us&client=firefox-a