Just Simply Holly

I’m sitting here this morning watching the Today Show. Meridith just had 3 or 4 women on talking about how the State of Texas has made it mandatory that girls in the state of Texas have the HPV vaccine.

Beginning in September 2008, girls entering the sixth grade will have to receive Gardasil, Merck & Co.’s new vaccine against strains of the human papillomavirus, or HPV.

While I think it’s great that there is a good possibility that the HPV vaccine is showing that it will prevent the virus that causes cervical cancer, it worries me that there has not been more studies done on this in young girls.

From this article you can see how the study was done on the vaccine. There were 552 participants from the US, Europe and Brazil. Of those 552, 277 received the actual shot series for the vaccination while 275 received a placebo. They monitored these women for 3 years and the results showed this:

Among the women who received the placebo, 36 either contracted HPV or developed one of the diseases associated with it. Of those, three developed genital warts and three developed pre-cancerous cervical lesions. Among the women who received the vaccine, four contracted HPV, but none of them developed any of the diseases associated with the virus. Overall, the researchers found that the experimental vaccine led to approximately 90% fewer cases of persistent infection or disease due to HPV types 16 and 18, which cause about 70% of cervical cancer cases, or types 6 and 11, which cause about 90% of all cases of genital warts. Although HPV antibodies dropped at the end of the study period among women who had received the experimental vaccine, their antibody levels were still higher than in women naturally infected with HPV.”

I don’t mean to come across as a person who is unwilling to do things that will help prevent cancer, but something about this vaccine worries me. I don’t understand how a state can mandate it amongst children in an age bracket that the vaccine was never even tested on. It was tested on females aged 16 to 23, but it’s being required for females going into the 6th grade in Texas. They are also unsure as to how long the vaccine remains effective since it was only monitored for 3 years. What if it’s effects wear off after 5 years? Would making a young girl of 11 get this vaccine so early only to have it wear off during the years when many become sexually active make sense? No, there are no studies that show that is what will happen, but we also don’t know that it won’t happen.

So, what are your thoughts on this? Am I way off about how I feel about this vaccine? Should I be more supportive of something so new even if we don’t know the long term effects of it? Or do you feel the same way I do about it? I’d love to know what other people think about this!