An Insider’s Opinion on Gardasil

The same old clichés over and over again; “I’m too young”, “It won’t happen to me”. If I had thought about it, that’s what I would have said.

But while I was careful to get my yearly exam, I never did think about it. Everything always turned out fine. I was young and healthy. I wasn’t promiscuous. I had been with the same person, my then husband, for over 10 years.

My only real vices were smoking too much and the occasional drink.

Then right before my 28th birthday, 2 weeks after I had faithfully gotten my yearly pap smear, my doctor calls and tells me that my results were abnormal. They had detected CIN1…pre-cancerous cells in my cervix. They wanted to do a biopsy. They wanted to cut a small chunk out of my cervix.

Cervical cancer is caused by an STD called HPV, or Human Papillomavirus. There are no symptoms, and 80% of all sexual active women will contract this disease in their lifetime. The virus can clear on its own, but in some cases, it will develop into cervical cancer. The American Cancer Society predicts that there will be about 9,710 new cases of invasive cervical cancer in 2006 and that about 3,700 women will die from it. Getting a regular yearly pap smear can detect it early, and now we have a vaccine for HPV that can prevent women from contracting this disease and the cervical cancer it causes.

The vaccine, Gardasil, made by the pharmaceutical company Merck, is shown to be 100% effective in preventing the strain of HPV that causes cervical cancer. Doctors are advising that women start receiving the vaccine at age 12. And therein seems to lie the problem, the inevitable controversy.

Even though the American Cancer Society has called Gardasil “one of the most important advances in women’s health in recent years,” parents are in an uproar at the idea of vaccinating their 12 year old daughters. The almost unanimous opinion among parents who oppose the vaccine is that it will be tantamount to giving their children permission to have sex at a young age. I’m sure they are the ones who more than likely teach abstinence to their children.

Abstinence is all good and well. But these people need to wake up and live in the real world. In the US, 7 out of 10 women have had sex before the age of 14. 1 in 4 of sexually active teens become infected with an STD every year. Chances are, your daughter will be having sex before she is 18. So will your son, who could pass along HPV to his partner if he has intercourse with a female who has it. It’s that old adage, when you have sex with someone, you are having sex with everyone that person has had sex with and so on.

Still think your children will practice abstinence and that in doing so they will keep themselves safe from HPV and cervical cancer? Then how about this statistic: 6 out of 10 girls who report having sex before age 15 state they had sex involuntarily.

Lets try another tact. When you take your child to get their normal immunizations, do you explain what they are for? I don’t know about you, but I just tell my children that the shot they are getting will keep them from getting a certain type of sickness. Which is what I will tell my daughter in about a year when she is old enough to have Gardasil.

Even if you don’t want to believe that your children will be sexual active teenagers, they will be sexual active adults. Why not give these young girls the vaccine now and know that when they do have sex, whenever that may be, they will not have to take the chance of contracting a disease that kills over 3,000 women a year in the US alone.