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.

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.

Typo Boy said beautifully the last part of what I was thinking. If a vaccination is only relevant to the kid getting it (i.e. not a contagious virus or disease), then I agree that it should be up to the parents. In this case, I completely agree that all children should be vaccinated, male and female. It's not about protecting just your child--it's about lessening the risk to everyone.

mumps really isn't that much more serious than chicken pox for most people.

Huh. I always thought it was more dangerous than that. Now I must wkikipedia it, mumps, and rubella...

Here's the thing about the HPV vaccine, to me, though: Obviously, the company that developed it is making a big play for use as a cancer preventative tool. But cervical cancer isn't that common, and not all cases are related to HPV. I'm looking at this big PDF [link] and it's about half as common among women as cancer of the rectum.

Obviously, it's a good idea to prevent disease, but I have to believe the colossal PR push around this is just to sell the vaccine.

This report is pretty interesting. Women overall have a 1 in 3 chance of getting some kind of cancer in their lifetime. It's a 1 in 8 chance of breast cancer, 1 in 17 chance of lung and bronchus, 1 in 38 of uterine corpus, 1 in 135 of uterine cervix.

Jesse, that was part of my thinking too... but now that Hil has sent me off to Wikipedia measels, mumps, and rubella...

Turns out they're hardly ever fatal. I always assumed they were something far more grim than the chicken pox I and everyone I knew ended up having. They CAN have further effects, (particularly if pregnant women are exposed) but they're largely more distressing than dangerous.

Well, and if someone told me I should pay $800 for a chicken pox vaccine, I'd probably decline that one, too. (That's how much the HPV would be for me with my GYN.)

Yeah, my Gyn said $600. That's when we had the "insurance will likely cover more people" discussion. So far I've opted to not pay for it.

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.

Actually from what I've been reading and hearing it's really 9 to 18 that's the most effective range. It's what the American Cancer Society is recommending for the window. The trick is the vaccine is extremely effective if you get it before your first exposure. The effectiveness drops tremendously after that. As such, the push is for it to happen before students enter middle school. Yes, there is the issue of the drug manufacturer having pushed to hard to get it mandatory, that was a stupid move on their part. However, most states that are looking at making it mandatory are doing that, in part, to make it mandatory for health insurance to cover the vaccine. Right now many insurers do not cover it. If it becomes a mandatory vaccination they will.