In the UK and mostly in the US girls are being vaccinated against HPV, but boys not.
This virus is now known to cause cervical cancer. It was thought that girls would be immunized and so not pass the virus onto boys.
A high percentage of the adult sexually active population have antibodies to this virus meaning that they contracted it at some time. Normally it does no real harm, but unfortunately in some it takes hold, causing cancer.

Nowadays boys are more educated in treating women as equals and practicing safe sex. Unfortunately this had led to an recent spike in throat cancer (Michael Douglas?) Anal cancer is also a concern. So it may be advisable to have boys as well as girls vaccinated; especially as not some boys have homosexual preferences and so may in fact contract this disease form a partner of the same sex.

I hasten to add that throat cancer is still rare.

http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/21/hpv...ntroversy.html

Wow, that was uninformative and misleading.

A quick précis.

US-centric report, saying "Big pharma bad, vaccines bad. It's all just greed. What do scientists know?"

hth

Each and every individual disease or other cause of death accounts for only a tiny percentage of all deaths. But the sume of all those percentages is 100%.

Scary innit?

Now stop worrying and get a life.

Don't worry, I didn't even bother to read that looooooooooooooooooooong post.

I understand this is a polarizing issue, so just want to quote your signature:

Please don't disregard other user's opinions no matter how right or wrong they maybe. This is the major principle of any Forum.

I'm not trying to convince anyone, just posting something that I thought was interesting when I read it as I like to always see both sides of an issue.

What's wrong with disregarding opinions that are wrong? Especially when your article is little more than Spam. Access to the original website article requires an email, why?

Yes, but when the first few paragraphs are wrong and misleading, don't you think you should reconsider your position?

Amongst your first lines, "has been pushed on the unsuspecting public without due safety testing". This shows your level of knowledge on the subject (i.e. 0).

FYI:

Gardisal protects against 4 strains of HPV, of which two are responsible for ~80% of cervical cancers.

Cervical cancer is not the most frequent cause of death, however, it is one of the cancers that strikes earliest, causing greater loss life years than breast cancer.

HPV infections are cyclical in nature, and repeated exposure to HPV increases the chance of cancer, with the precursor to cancer - cervical dysplasia - also prevented by the vaccine. So it isn't like you are stopping a condition developing, you are reducing the risk at the root cause, i.e. before any HPV infection takes place.

The vaccine was never intended to replace PAP smears or other screening

Gardasil protects against other conditions, including genital warts and other GU cancers (albeit rare ones).

But, hey, the choice is yours.

As my signature says...

__________________
Never let right or wrong get in the way of a good opinion

One side is informed, and backed up by hard science, the other is ill-informed opinion.

Scientific evidence can only be countered by other scientific evidence. Scientific truth is not arrived at by debate, but by evidence, experiment and results.

If only it was that easy... the reason there is so much debate over the issue is because there is a mixture of truth on both sides, and a mixture of evidence and there is a HUGE amount of emotional reaction on both sides of the issue which blinds people to the real issues at hand and ignites the debate unneccessarily.

Science is a term that is flaunted as being the gold standard of determining if something is true or accurate, but science itself is conducted by people with opinions and agendas and motives as well, which in turn produces studies from various viewpoints meaning that no-one is un-biased, it is just a matter of stating clearly what that particular bias is.

Pretending one side is unbiased and reliable and the other isn't is a polarizing and simplistic view and does not acknowledge the complexity of the issue or the world in general as most issues are much more complex than simply being black and white - right or wrong.

I like to be a bit more open and willing to learn what I possibly can from either side, as I once sat very far on one side of the fence of many issues but am learning to be a bit more open and am trying to not let my emotions cloud my judgments. Hence my desire to post that article to just spark a little interest in the other side and it always amazes me to see how people jump down someone's throat for doing that.

Please do not look at everything on the web, especially those with a Pop-Up that says,
"subscribe now and get something more free".

The truth is here, paid for by your taxes http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/hpv/default.htm

Who should not get vaccinated? http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/...t-vacc.htm#mmr

Why am I cross? http://www.newscientist.com/special/living-in-denial

For those amongst us that can't concentrate, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_span

…and I know I shouldn’t respond to it, but it is just too easy. Just off the bat, so to speak...

That would be scientific evidence being contradicted and refuted by further scientific evidence. It is called RESEARCH, as suggested by NotAllThere.

Groundbreaking stuff here, i.e. no shit Sherlock…

They’re all in this together! Run for the hills!

This is one criticism that could be taken seriously. The US Government – and others - is clamping down on this heavily. But to suggest that only studies funding by big bad Pharma are skewed is naïve at best, and suggest that you are not so unbiased yourself.



It just gets better, doesn’t it…

Here’s what Wiki has to say about this “infamous” conference and its criticism…

	Quote:	Wiki
	The key event at the conference was the presentation by Dr. Thomas Verstraeten of a study, based on data obtained from the Vaccine Safety Datalink, examining the possibility of a link between mercury in vaccines and neurological problems in children who had received those vaccines. After Rolling Stone and Salon.com published a story about the conference and study by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. containing numerous major errors,[1] the conference became notorious among those who believed that proof of danger from vaccines had been revealed at the conference and then hushed up by government and private industry. Salon magazine later corrected the article multiple times for factual errors and ultimately retracted the article

Sounds like a similar situation to the MMR/autism story that Itigen mentioned earlier.

But let’s go on anyway…

So, instead of creating mass hysteria and panic, they thought they’d do some more research… Sounds reasonable to me.

Errr… actually you want to see whether the active ingredient (i.e. the drug) has any effect, so really that comparison is valid… That’s also an important concept to grasp, that clearly your friends and “natural.com” or whatever it is haven’t managed yet.

This just goes on and on. You try to get uniform patients to exclude variables. This means getting a group of set patients. You tend to exclude elderly and very young as in an experimental setting the former is fraught with complications – have you any idea how many drugs elderly patients take that could confound a result – or the young, as you don’t want to expose them to unnecessary risks.

Testing vaccines, in particular, is very different to other treatments, as the patients are healthy to start with. This is another fundamental difference that the authors of your article seems to miss.

__________________
Never let right or wrong get in the way of a good opinion

Swiss government pharmaceutical agency in Berne. 45 products were recalled in past 30 days. Someone is looking after you, do not be paranoic,

http://www.swissmedic.ch/rueckrufe_m...x.html?lang=de

and some Swiss government warnings

http://www.swissmedic.ch/marktueberw...x.html?lang=en

http://www.swissmedic.ch/marktueberw...x.html?lang=en

That link you sent about the swiss government protecting us from bad imports of drugs was quite entertaining (no disrespect at all, I mean it in a good way!) It was quite interesting to read about what products people are trying to import from various countries and what has been confiscated....in my opinion people that order stuff like that online (and in general really) show that they don't have an understanding of general health in the first place if they think that slimming tablets and sexual enhancement tablets will be able to help them :P hehe...was an enetertaining piece to read just before lunch :-)

I forgot to add the link to the article I meant:

http://www.swissmedic.ch/aktuell/000...x.html?lang=en

was quite interesting...seems people are importing a lot of stuff from India of all places...and it looks like there is a mass issue of men with problems - gosh I had no idea so many men struggled with that- I wonder if there has been a large increase of the incidence of this in the past 50 years....hmmmm someone should do some research ;-)

These were the top 3 drugs illegally imported:

Erectile dysfunction drugs 24%
Slimming products 14%
Muscle enhancers 12%

Seems like we have a lot of insecure people out there who are willing to try anything to get the perfect body...sad...cause I am sure those things do more harm than good.

Would these be the same people who post dodgy articles and form their opinions based on something they read on mercola.com, because he doesn't have any vested interests or conflicts of interest, does he?

Dang it and I wanted to come up with a funny come back line but couldn't think of one right now...this has been a very fun morning...I have enjoyed this discussion a lot ;-)

So what do you think mercola's vested or conflict of interests(or any other alternative health website for that matter) might be in writing articles telling people about the possible side effects of HPV vaccines? I'd be genuinely interested to know. How do you think they are benefiting by spreading that information?

Ok, now either you are just trolling or seriously naive.

Ok, did you read the "about me" part of the website? He practices and preaches osteopathy. That is a set of alternative medicine approaches. They are not bad at all, but the people who are really into it typically become quite religious about them.

Mercola is not a MD - but exclusively into alternative medicine. It is his life and business to scare people off traditional approaches and make them try out his way. If you really believe into osteopathy, you think that the body is one unit and needs to be treated accordingly. So any type of medication that singles out a cause for a disease and fights it with a focus is against your "religion". The article you linked it a great example: The vaccine is focused on a few strains that are responsible for >80% of the disease. The doctor will answer that there are ten strains left and the other 20% ignored...

If you are ill, you go to your doctor - Mercola does not earn anything.

If you are ill and read his stuff that you should not trust your doctor - you will buy his stuff.

Easy.

You're not suggesting that an alternative medicine practitioner could actually behaving in an unethical fashion - I thought that was the sole preserve of big pharma.