1 in 4 women are currently infected with a form of HPV. At some point in their lives up to 75% of women will be infected.
A vast majority of people become sexually active at some point in their lives. The only way to be certain that you cannot be exposed to a sexually transmitted disease is to only have sex with people who your are certain have never had sex, or who have been tested for HPV.
You don’t have to be “sexually promiscuous” to get HPV. It is so prevalent that you have a reasonable likelyhood of catching it even the first time you have sex.
And since HPV can also be spread through oral sex, you don’t even have to have intercourse; and it is an unfortunate but true fact that an increasing number of girls are engaging in oral sex as a “non-sex” act.
Of course, given the sexual promiscuity in our culture, it hardly argues against the vaccine to claim that only sexually promiscuous people are at risk. I would note that Sarah Palin’s daughter had sex with a guy who likely had sex with other girls, and she could have been exposed to HPV, and gotten cervical cancer, and died. Yet I doubt anybody would have expected that Bristol Palin would be “sexually promiscuous”.
Most of us don’t expect our sons and daughters to misbehave. We teach them what is right, and we hope they listen. But in my rather conservative church, we not only have had several teen pregnancies, but one of our elders confessed to a long-term affair. His wife could have ended up with an HPV — and I guess some here would have blamed her for it for some strange reason I can’t fathom.
I do not believe we should withhold a vaccine from someone because they are sexually promiscuous. I do think people should evaluate THEIR risk of disease vs the risk from the vaccine. That is why I never get flu shots, and why to this point neither of my children have received the HPV vaccine.
But if my daughter went crazy and slept with some guy, and got cancer and died from HPV, I’d probably second-guess my decision not to get her vaccinated. But here we will argue over whether someone died from the vaccine, and we won’t blink an eye at hundreds of sexually active women who die from cancer that would have been prevented had they gotten the vaccine.
It never helps when people use the term HPV. HPV is the human papilloma virus. It is very common, it is not new. HPV sites in the skin and mucous membranes. HPV is what causes warts. Any warts. Ever have warts? Most people do have warts at some point in their lives, and it is likely that all persons beyond a certain age have some HPV somewhere in their body.
Only a subset of HPV’s cause genital warts, and only a subset of genital warts can become cervical cancer. Further the touted vaccines only work on some but not all of the few HPVs that are known to POSSIBLY cause cervical cancer.
Cancerous cells when formed are best fought by the body’s natural defense mechanisms. Many of those general defense mechanisms are compromised, weakened by promiscuous sexuality, in ways not directly related to any HPV contagion.
Even in the types of warts in the genital area caused by the type of HPVs which can POSSIBLY develop into cervical cancer, most warts never do so.
Reason, full clear information rationally presented to be understandable without provoking short-cutting emotional reactions are the hallmarks of good public health policy.
Hyperbole, fear-mongering, loose-goosey conflations of infection and disease vectors, panic — these are hallmarks of bad public health policy.