Cervical Cancer Jab for all teen girls

[FlameInHell]

What do you think?

Yay or nay?

sorry, not very clear..
my point about killing birds with stones;

I mean - sex ed and screening and is going to prevent them all (most). an expensive task maybe but cheaper than vaccinating against each disease individually even if you could iyswim.

and weather you think there are risks of vaccinating or not, to vaccinate against everything you could? would you honestly let so many drugs into your body?

sow the seeds of attitude change for our future generations. if we don't make them protect themseves there will be even more nasties to have to protect them from in the future.

i hope your kids never make the mistakes or judgement errors many of us, including myself, have - especially as young people when the brain actually doesn't fully understand the concept of mortality.

i'm all for giving people, particulary young people, the most information we can to help them make an informed decision.

but to stop making medical advances for disease prevention/cure?

that's pure stupidity, IMO.

drugs in your body?

it's a killed virus, not a gram of cocaine.

I think its a brilliant idea, AFAIK, the reason they say to start at twelve is not because of the age sex is likely to start, but when the vaccine is more likely to work? Maybe someone can correct me there.
As for it being a 'sex jab' if they said 'oh, we have jabs against gonorrhea,herpes,syphillis,hiv,chlamydia etc etc but its best to give a child them at 6, then I'd be straight down the clinic with my DD.
Surely prevention, at whatever age is better than cure.

come on expat, that is not what I meant... drugs in my body

I was suggesting that having a vaccine for every disease would potentially cause some damage to one's body.

talk about being taken out of context!

also was I really suggesting stopping medical advances? non.
I think stupidity is not thinking about what is being put into your dc's body with your consent.

Pharmaceutical drugs/vaccines do have side effects and those risks do need to be considered against the risk of contracting a disease. They also can contain a cocktail of lethal substances such as anti-freeze formadehyde and mercury. Personally I prefer to make an informed decision rather than just assume that something is safe because a drug company says it is when they stand to make billions.

lorayn, my point is that this is not the only kind of protection, it is one kind of prevention that may or may not be harmful, the other kind of prevention -sex ed, screening and attitude change will prevent from all sti's not just one.

here here rebelmum

This is hpv we're talikng about, not the common cold, it is an extremely dangerous disease, ok, make your choice whether or not you accept that vaccine, thats understandable rebelmum, but this could save tons of lives.

Also, as for side affects, all drugs have possibel side affects, and we weigh the use of the drug, the possible side affects and the problem it will eradicate.
Look at chemo and the side affects that produuces, but the other choice is cancer. Sometimes the side affects outweigh the problem, and I believe with things like HPV that risk is worth taking.

Well, it isn't going to be mandatory, it will be parental consent, which is as these things should be, really. The best any parent can do is weigh up risk factors and benefits and go on that.

Lorayn - yes, you are right, in the French article I read about Gardasil it said that 10-12 was the optimal age for the vaccine to be effective - in addition to the benefit of having the vaccination before sexual activity starts.

Sue - just sad I am out of the age range for it.

Don't understand ob's point of view at all. No one is saying this is instead of sex ed, condoms, etc. It's as well as.

And as far the idea it will promote promiscuity, I doubt there's ever been a teenager who's held back from having sex because of fear of cervical cancer.

Does the tetanus jab encourage people to be careless with rusty bits of old metal?

I'm personally really glad to hear about the vaccine only wish I had been able to have it. I have had "abnormal" smear results since the age of 17, I have had soooo many smears, colposcopy's and treatments. I am really pleased that the research is getting somewhere.

I have to say though that my "abnormal" smears have never been assosiated to my sexual history. I was told initally that I had contracted HPV but was not given any further information about how I got it or what it is.

I am really pleased to know that maybe my neice (and possible future DD's) won't have to go through what I've gone through.

Indeed, Eisdvold. But at least our children have an opportunity we didn't.

Of course people should be responisible for themselves but there are limits. Would screening mean women rejecting fathers for their children on the basis of the result? 'Sorry mate, you're HPV pos - go sling yer hook.' Also, in the sad situation of rape, surely it would be better to have protection against a killer disease than not.

puix - you are missing my point. think of the cost of this programme vs the cost of an education programe that will change an attitude to protection against ALL sti's.

looking back wouldn't you like to have known about hpv as a teenager? would you like to have been fully aware and known from as young as possible and then it just be like second nature to you to use contraception.

suedonim, no; we should use contraception with our sexual partners until we are sure that we are both safe by means of sti screening (now available) and treatment (if required) just like I did. it wasn't hard, it just made perfect sense.

it doesn't take very long to change attitudes. look over the last 20 years and see what attitude has changed to do with our heath.
smoking in public places? could you imagine that being banned 20 years ago?
environmental issues? we are more aware now, as a nation, than we were even just 10 years ago about the reasons for being more environmental.
healthy eating in schools? this is doing a huge U turn.

all these changes are brought about by health education. whether it happens by way of drip-feeding the information or by way of huge gov campaigning, the message eventually gets through.

we CAN change our kids generation's attutude toward their health -especially sexual heath, and by doing so we will protect them from so much more than just hpv.

the cost is such a big factor in this, the vaccine will be costing a fortune, and making someone people a fortune.

it's all too political!

(the rape issue by btw is valid, but imo doesn't warrent this kind of campaign. remember that this vaccine is NOT 100% effective so there Will be people that will contract hpv reguardless. if they phase out screening then where does that leave those people?)

As there are no plans to phase out cervical screening this is a complete red herring. I think you have way too much faith in health education. Trying to get people to give up smoking (and not to start) is a really good example of how ineffective a methodology it is. We knew about the effects of smoking over 50 years ago, and yet around about a quarter of the population do it (and it's higher amoungst children). Education about sexual health has also been around for years, and was accelerated in the 80's with AIDS, however STI rates in young people is actually growing. As we have a publicly run and funded health system we should expect it to put funds where there is a proven effect, with effective prevention as the most cost effective approach. If you think we should move to a personally driven approach to health, then we should move away from a national health service to a tailored insurance approach,because the NHS itself mitigates against poor choices on all sorts of fronts (smoking, eating the wrong things, not taking exercise, doing dangerous things etc).

Oh, and I'm an eighteist kid. We were bombarded with the AIDS message. Did it make using a condom second nature? No, because teenagers think they are invincible, and actually don't even want to think about being 30, let alone grown up.

I have masses of faith in education.

I have little faith in what the government want us to believe.

smoking cessation is a half-baked campaign also as there is big money involved in that too.

Not sure what you mean about the smoking cessation campaigns. Every NHS organisation in the country is judged partly on how many people they get to stop smoking, so there is a lot of money put into this at a local level as well as nationally. It's all very well to have faith, but in prctice the evidence suggests that education takes a long long time and produces fairly small shifts per generation. Whereas immunisations are one of the few interventions that have measurable medium term population effects. Of course this will be limited to a single strain of a particular disease, but hey what could be wrong with that?

I beleive its an extremly good thing. We can educate our children all we want but we can't force them to listen for a start (and we cannot rpedict who willa nd who won't- like Suebaoo I amrried a virgin but I definitely wasn't one!). Also, we can't protect any person against violence induced sexual iintercourse (ie rape) within a relationship or or not, so it makes sense to protect as best we can. there have been threads in the past about how many people on MN have been raped- the answer was horrifying!

it just seems to be the wrong way around to me.

where do you draw the line? if there was a vaccine for every single life threatening disease, would they be offered? would you give them all to your dc?

at some point we need to change tactics, but I don't believe this will happen while parmacutical companies have so much control over our nhs.

I would probably feel different if it was a jab to prevent the cervical cancer, but it isn't.

we used to put our babies to sleep on their fronts, now we all know that it increases risk of cot death. that happened very quickly thanks to the back-to-sleep campaign.

and what about those that the vaccine will not work for?

incidently, my sil has had pre-cancerous cells, from hpv, she recieved treatment and now has regular screening.
she is very much of the same opinion as me. she would rather have known all about hpv from a young age, than just vaccinate and forget about it. which is what will happen, the girls will forget about it. or is that ok?

If it was clinically and cost effective, then yes. Why not? I don't understand your reasoning what on earth is wrong with avoiding life threatening diseases? And why should I want my daughter to worry about HPV if she doesn't need to? Not that at 7 she has heard of it (probably like most sexually active girls at the moment to be honest). I think that you are worrying that girls may think that this vaccine will protect them against sexually transmitted diseases which is indeed a worry and should be combated with good education, but is surely not a good reason for actively choosing not to protect in this instance? I think if the government chose not to introduce this vaccine people would be campaigning for it.

Obab I disagree with lots of your points but to answer just one, there is (afaik) no treatment for the strain of HPV that causes cervical cancer. I'm not even sure (someone please correct me if I'm wrong) if there is a reliable screening programme for it in men...?

So your point about screening and treatment is mis-informed.

The logical extension of your argument is that every single person who is a carrier of HPV is doomed to remain forever single and childless. At present most of the sexually active population carries some strain of HPV so clearly this is never going to happen. Whereas an effective vaccination programme could eradicate the virus within a few generations.

This vaccine is nothing to do with encouraging responsible sexual behaviour - which of course should be encouraged regardless of what advances are made in health. It is about protecting against an extremely common, undetectable and potentially fatal virus. If you don't want to do that, that's absolutely fine, of course. But it doesn't mean it's a bad idea.

See the section ' HPV - Cervical Cancer Vaccine' section on Jabs These type of reports do give me cause for concern for my girls.