Monday, October 20: I find the following statistic quite surprising: one in four teen girls have rolled up their sleeves and received Gardasil, the relatively new vaccine against cervical cancer that targets the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus.
The Centers for Disease Control announced these findings last week after conducting household telephone surveys in late 2007. Gardasil came on the market during the summer of 2006, so that’s why I’m amazed that one-in-four teen girls have already received Gardasil. After all, we’re talking about a vaccine that’s been out on the market for only two years and costs $375, although many health insurers cover the three-shot series.
I wrote about Gardasil in my book, “The Great Physician’s Rx for Children’s Health,” which released in early 2007. I wondered what the rush was all about to get this vaccine to “market,” as they like to say. After all, Gardasil should be administered before girls become sexually active—like the age of 11 or 12.
Two things troubled me about Gardasil, and still do today. One, the manufacturer, Merck & Co., donated money to targeted state lawmakers in hopes they would pass vaccine mandates for Gardasil in their states. None have so far, but there was tons of money on the table if state legislatures ordered mandatory Gardasil vaccination for millions of young girls. But last month, the U.S. Department of Home Security issued an edict requiring girls and young women who immigrate to the U.S. to get Gardasil as a condition of entering this country.
Two, a mandate to vaccinate all sixth graders was grossly premature because we need more data on the vaccine’s long-term safety and effectiveness before administering it to an entire population of middle-school girls. Furthermore, I don’t like how parental choice was pushed aside or the message that Gardasil will protect them from a sexually transmitted disease. Sure, teen sex happens, but young people have a way of thinking they’re “bullet proof,” and Gardasil may boost that feeling.
Besides, I’m not sold on vaccines in general. We’ve chosen not to vaccinate our three children for reasons I described in yesterday’s blog, while at the same recognizing that there are two sides to the vaccination issue.
Childhood immunizations against life-threatening diseases have been around since British physician Edward Jenner inoculated eight-year-old James Phipps in 1796 with cowpox to provide an immunity against smallpox, an acute, highly contagious disease that caused blister-like lesions. In those days, the smallpox death rate was 50 percent or higher. During the 19th and 20th centuries, an estimated 300 million deaths were attributed to smallpox until the World Health Organization certified its eradication in 1979.
Polio, which cripples the muscles needed for swallowing and breathing, swept across the United States several times during the 20th century.
My father was born in 1952, the same year a coast-to-coast polio outbreak prompted widespread hysteria. Children were warned not to drink from water fountains and avoid amusement parks, municipal pools, and city beaches. Newsreels showed helpless kids locked inside iron lungs, which looked like a fate worse than death to frightened parents. The polio outbreak wasn’t quelled until 1955 with the introduction of the Salk vaccine. Our country’s first modern mass inoculation led to a 90 percent decline in the incidences of polio.
My father, like practically every child growing up in the Fifties, was vaccinated against deadly diseases like polio, measles, diphtheria, and whooping cough. Called one of the greatest public health achievements in history, childhood vaccinations have prevented millions of premature deaths and saved countless more children from disfiguring illnesses. Well-intentioned laws were passed that parents couldn’t enroll their children in public schools without an immunization certificate signed by a physician unless they sought a religious exemption.
A half century later, though, I wonder if the pendulum has swung too far. These days most kids get about 20 vaccines (against 11 diseases) by the time they turn two years old; that’s a 400 percent increase just from the mid-1980s, when children were immunized five times against seven different diseases.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s current vaccination schedule calls for the following immunizations during the first six years of life:
• Hepatitis B vaccine
• Rotavirus vaccine (for infant diarrhea)
• Diphtheria and tetanus toxoids and acellular pertussis vaccine (DTaP)
• Haemophilus influenzae type b conjugate vaccine (Hib)
• Pneumococcal vaccine
• Influenza vaccine
• Measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine (MMR)
• Varicella vaccine
• Hepatitis A vaccine (HepA)
• Meningococcal polysaccharide vaccine (MPSV4)
Our children haven’t received any of these vaccines, and we plan to sign “philosophical and religious exemption” waivers when we enroll them in elementary school.