'Bushwhacked'
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
Anyway. The article mentions a family that's raised their kids vegan since birth, and the kids are fine. It's got this sentence: "Though the kids rank approximately in the 50th percentile for height and weight, they are normal, active children who take multivitamins and eat fortified cereal and soy milk, according to their parents." What on earth is that "though" at the beginning of the sentence supposed to mean?
Apparently, most kids are above average. Maybe the writer is from Lake Wobegon?
That said, I think every young woman should get the vaccine, because cervical cancer, bad.
Me, too. My daughter will get it, mandatory or not. I just object to the government making me do things.
A mandatory vaccine could make it as nearly extinct as polio in a generation or two. I don't see a downside.The downside I see is infringing upon people's civil liberties. If it is mandated, and a person chooses not to have the vaccine (or if a parent chooses to delay a child's vaccine for whatever reason), what's going to result is that the person cannot get into school. You aren't going to catch HPV in a school setting, so you shouldn't have to be vaccinated against it, to go to school.
That's the only way states "mandate" vaccines. They don't stop everyone at the state line and shoot them up.
My "zap 'em all" had more to do with the feeling that insurance should cover it for everybody because zapping everybody is how you control a disease.
Right now if you're not a woman between, what, nine and twenty six you need to pony up $300+ dollars to get it. My ObGyn suspects that coverage limitation has more to do with available stocks than anything else and that in time it will extend to older women and then to men.
As far as it being mandatory... now that its been linked to oral cancer... if JZs depiction of "intimate contact" is what we're dealing with it probably should.
If its purely intercourse I'm still on the fence -- I can only control my own sexual behavior. I can't control my child's, my partner's, or my child's partner's. Epidemiologically speaking that seems like a lot of risk.
If it is mandated, and a person chooses not to have the vaccine (or if a parent chooses to delay a child's vaccine for whatever reason), what's going to result is that the person cannot get into school. You aren't going to catch HPV in a school setting, so you shouldn't have to be vaccinated against it, to go to school.
Lots of anti-vac folks are getting wavers--for things like MMR, so I think this one will have opt-out wavers, too.
I get itchy with the anti-vac crowd when it comes to common and dangerous illnesses but I don't see the point in making them get their kids vaccinated. If they lose a child to a common, preventable illness (at any age), it's their loss, not mine.
I do worry about over vaccinating, but the thing that bugs me is the chicken pox vaccine. Sheesh, its just chicken pox... is it mandatory for school?
Sheesh, its just chicken pox... is it mandatory for school?
Chicken pox can have some pretty serious complications in kids with asthma, I think.
OK, I can't find a cite for that right now, but it can cause serious problems if a pregnant woman who never had the disease or the vaccine is exposed to a kid who's infected.
Just like tonsilitis, chicken pox is more dangerous as you get older.
Also, vaccination for mumps has been standard for years, and mumps really isn't that much more serious than chicken pox for most people.
The university I'm at now requires either a chicken pox vaccine, a culture that shows you've been exposed and have immunity, or a doctor's records showing that you've had it, for any student under 26. (I went the doctor's records route, which took a bit of research -- I had chicken pox when I was three years old, which was several doctors ago. So I didn't have any records from the doctor who actually saw me then, but I had Dr. K.'s records, which said that Dr. R.'s records said that Dr. B.'s records said that I had chicken pox in July 1984.)
I have mixed feelings, but...
I just wish the HPV vaccine had been invented and mandatory 20 years ago. Almost everyone sexually active has some form of HPV (or multiple forms); I think the current stats are over 95%, so pretty much everyone reading this post. I know I have at least one strain since I was treated for abnormal cervical cells nearly 15 years ago. I've been lucky--I haven't had an abnormal Pap since, so it's possible that I have one of the dozens of mostly harmless strains which will never flare up again--but it is equally possible that one of the dangerous strains is waiting in remission to give me cancer.
I also have pretty strong feelings about taking necessary steps to eradicate diseases. My grandfather lived the last 30 years of his life paralyzed from the neck down because of Polio, and my father permenantly lost 50% of the muscle mass in his legs from the same. Because the government was incredibly proactive once the vaccine was invented, I never had to have it. Thirty years of mandatory vaccines had eradicated Polio in the US, and I was born the year after they lifted the mandatory vaccination of all children.
I'm usually crazy pro Civil Rights girl, but when it comes to deadly diseases? I want mandatory vaccines.
I get itchy with the anti-vac crowd when it comes to common and dangerous illnesses but I don't see the point in making them get their kids vaccinated. If they lose a child to a common, preventable illness (at any age), it's their loss, not mine.
OK, but the risk is not just to them. Vaccines have a limited protection for the person getting vaccinated if they are the only one taking them. In the case HPV I think is 75%, in other more. The real protection is the herd affect. If everone or almost everyone takes it then when it fails for one person, the odds are it won't be passed on to someone else, and if it is, the odds are it won't get passed to the next person.
So if you are vaccinated and no one else is , you still have a 1 in 4 chance of catching if exposed and a real good chance of getting exposed. But if everybody (or nearly everybody has the vaccine, you have a three in four chance of resistance if exposed, plus a good chance of not getting exposed.
Incidentally, this is why boys should be vaccinated against HPV as well. In addition to the chance that it does something we don't know about to them, even if they are asymptomatic they can pass it on to girls. If boys are vaccinated as well as girls you get a much better herd affect.