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Dr.,
The only reason we do PAP smears is to look for changes due to HPV. The. Only. Reason.

99.7% plus of all cancerous, or precancerous cervical findings are due to HPV.

Now, you were writing about “misbehaving” girls? Virgins who marry “misbehaving” boys contract HPV, too.

None of the deaths were confirmed to be due to the vaccine. In fact, the CDC, JAMA, and the very conservative(Bush-appointed and media vilified for those conservative views) FDA panel that reviewed the VAERS in 2008 all confirm that there’s no causal relationship, only temporal. http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/vaccines/hpv/gardasil.html

Remember your statistics classes. With 33 million doses, there are bound to be deaths that coincide with the timing of the vaccine use. The teen death rate from all causes is 62 per 100,000 across the US. http://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/acrossstates/Rankings.aspx?ind=25 Most of those are boys, but still: In 10 million girls, 30 deaths are not outside the rate for the age group.

More likely the girls in question were at higher risk due to the population presenting to clinics giving the vaccine: those who present with worries about STD’s, the newly sexually active and those entering college. They were given new scripts for birth control pills and other vaccines and meds.

Also remember the silicon, SSRI, and the general vaccine scares that have been blown out of proportion through the years and later proven to be untrue.

Now, you were writing about “misbehaving” girls? Virgins who marry “misbehaving” boys contract HPV, too.

No need to put misbehaving in quotation marks. We know that as promiscuity and general misbehavior increases, so do rates of HPV. Most women who marry in the U.S. are adults, so they can decide for themselves whether:

1. The fiance should be tested (unfortunately, easy, common tests are not available, but a urologist can do one).
2. She decides as a grown woman that she doesn't want to take a chance or scare a fiance off by forcing him to take the test, and goes and DECIDES FOR HERSELF to get the expensive vaccine with its included risks, in order to lessen the odds of getting the handful of strains out of more than 100 (albeit worse ones) that Gardasil deals with. If her fiance is circumcised, there is a considerably lower chance of his being infected. A grown woman can take these factors into consideration and decide for herself. She doesn't need Gov. Perry to decide for her.

None of the deaths were confirmed to be due to the vaccine.

Puh-leeze. That reminds me of the old official position of the American Tobacco Institute that maintained for decades that there was no proof that the use of tobacco products caused lung cancer, as correlation is not necessarily causation.

The teen death rate from all causes is 62 per 100,000 across the US. [ . . . ] Most of those are boys, but still: In 10 million girls, 30 deaths are not outside the rate for the age group.
Once you remove car accidents, suicides, drug overdoses, and also those suffering from severe childhood diseases that frequently lead to early death, the number gets much, MUCH, lower. Unless the autopsy can show a brain aneurysm, undiagnosed heart condition or similar, there is not a whole lot left. Thirty is the CDC number, other sources claim 50 or 80. Besides the deaths, the number of non-trivial side-effects reported (e.g. kidney failure, seizures, arthritis, etc.) number in the thousands.

The complicating pre-existing conditions (birth control pills, obesity, smoking, other medications) that you mentioned in the earlier post means that a large majority of those given the vaccine are likely to be less than ideal candidates for it. This is yet another reason why a mandatory one-size-fits-all remedy is a bad approach.

While some vaccine scares have proven to be untrue or exaggerated, we don't have to take the governor's, the FDA's, or the pharmaceutical company's word for it. When they are wrong, it turns out to be a whopper. It wasn't long ago that a Hepatitis-B vaccine mandated for newborns in several states caused a very high rate of colon separation before changes were made. That is a nasty way to get a large scale trial.

I have had Lyme Disease, so I was interested in finding out more about that vaccine as it was being developed, but decided to hold off. It turns out that the effectiveness was not great, and there were other problems that me glad that I held off. The U.S. held onto the weak-live polio vaccine for so long that at one point, the ONLY cases of polio in the country came from it (about 7). Since then, the U.S. has wisely switched to the less effective, more expensive but less risky dead-cell version.

I personally know of an entire classroom in Canada that became quite sick from a bad batch of (I think) mumps vaccine. One girl died, another has a permanently compromised immune system. The rest ultimately recovered. Now, this had nothing to do with the vaccine itself, but is a not-so gentle reminder that one must be careful with what one injects one's body with. It might well be worth it to prevent a deadly illness, but I'll just let my kids contract chicken pox the old fashioned way rather than letting the vaccine wear off and let them be at risk again as young adults.

I am not looking to take the chicken pox vaccine off the market, and might even consider that a more thoroughly tested Gardasil might have a role. I would reserve government mandates only be considered for serious diseases that are not already eliminated (smallpox, being an example that has been eliminated) that can be spread through casual contact (e.g. coughed upon, shaking hands, riding next to on a subway, etc.).

HPV, and even cervical cancer itself, do not fall into that category.