Comments on: Statistically transmitted diseases

By: Joseph Rahimian

Joseph Rahimian — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:23:30 +0000

Just to clarify, what I told Foxnews is that teaching abstinence does not translate into a significant decline in rates of STD’s, based on the medical literature. Obviously if you are actually not having sex, you wont get an STD, but simply telling young people not to have sex is inadequate as a mode of prevention, for the overall population. -joseph rahimian

By: Jennifer

Jennifer — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 22:15:14 +0000

The stories of deaths and adverse reactions are from hPV vaccine are greatly exaggerated. There is no evidence of any dise effects other than soreness and other mild symptoms. The “vaccine as a cause of death” reports were culled from VAERS reports by anti-vaccine groups and are far from scientific.

By: Ryan Balton

Ryan Balton — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:44:14 +0000

I live in the community that this FOX News story was about… and it’s a load of sensationalized BS picked up from a nearby daily paper. The CDC is not “stepping in”… the story only came up because the school district sent a letter to parents who think that STDs and teenage pregnancies don’t exist at all in a small town like ours. The letter only indicates that the CDC has identified to the school district a student who has HIV and that the CDC and other public health services, NOT the school district, is responsible for recording partners the HIV positive student has had sexual relations with.

By: Chris Bolinger

Chris Bolinger — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 04:04:31 +0000

All girls should be vaccinated for their own protection.

Your statement assumes that the vaccine is the only effective way to deal with HPV and that the vaccine has no significant side effects. Neither assumption is valid. There is means to kill HPV, but the vested interests in the vaccine don’t make money on that. As for side effects, I consider death a fairly severe one, and people have died from the vaccine.

Vaccinating all girls instead of trying to foretell whether they will eventually marry faithful husbands - makes sense to me.

That’s fine for you, but when the government mandates that every girl must have a vaccine with notable potential side effects when there is another (and arguably better) option, then our freedoms are being infringed.

Too bad the vaccine doesnâ€™t protect against all varieties of HPV, but better to be protected against some rather than none.

That’s like swinging a hammer at a hornet’s nest.

By: Julia

Julia — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 01:07:32 +0000

Chris:

Girls who never have pre-marital sex and are later faithful in marriage can still get HPV from a cheating husband. All girls should be vaccinated for their own protection.

Back in the day, everybody entering the hospital was tested for syphillis, even nuns. It made no sense to decide who was likely to have it or not - the aim was to wipe out the disease and wholesale testing simplifies things.

Vaccinating all girls instead of trying to foretell whether they will eventually marry faithful husbands - makes sense to me. Vaccination does not work as well when the girl is older. Too bad the vaccine doesn’t protect against all varieties of HPV, but better to be protected against some rather than none.

Do you know anybody who has died of uterine cancer? It’s not pretty.

By: Chris Bolinger

Chris Bolinger — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 23:48:26 +0000

Math is hard, and apparently business is harder for many in the press. A simple game of “follow the money” reveals that the pharmaceutical industry stands to gain the most if the government requires teenaged girls to get an HPV vaccine. And which industry is a leader in lobbying?

I can’t tell which is worse, lazy reporters or physicians who roll over for the pharmaceutical industry, regardless of what is in the best long-term interests of their patients. Both make me ill.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 21:34:07 +0000

I agree with emily.

math is hard

For reporters, evidently very hard, and not just in the persistence of this “one in four” meme and failure to note that 10% is less than 25%. Many a story cloned from a press release from a conservative social-policy think tank has included sham statistics tending to exaggerate some social problem, and never have I seen a reporter call them on it.

By: Mollie

Mollie — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:31:10 +0000

Emily,

Unless he’s a doctor clueless as to how diseases are spread, I figure he meant to make a claim about sex education. So yes, I think the reporter or copy editor should have asked for clarification and included [education] in brackets to help the reader.

By: emily

emily — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:24:05 +0000

Perhaps the doctor’s quote should have read “no study that abstinence education is…”? I wonder if he originally made the statement as it is written (in which case it makes no sense, as you note), or whether the word “education” was inadvertently dropped from it in transcribing the quote or typing the story. Either way you would think that a copy editor somewhere might have scratched their head at that quote.

By: Brian Walden

Brian Walden — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:30:59 +0000

I think there’s a big tangled logical mess in here. Most sex education debates pit abstinence against condoms, at least when it comes to disease prevention. HPV throws a wrench in this argument because when used 100% correctly abstinence prevents HPV while condoms even if they never malfunction do not offer complete protection. If HPV is the big problem, how much contraception education is going to help the kids?