reply to post by ignorant_ape
Shrug. My personal position is that I have yet to see data that
definitively links HPV as the
de facto, primary cause of cervical
cancer. I have definitely seen data that
circumstantially links it with cervical cancer.
I would hesitate before I took a vaccine from a company known to have developed drugs that cause cardiovascular/liver problems (the FDA does *not*
have your best interests in mind all of the time) to combat a virus that can in many cases be eradicated by the immune system.
While only 3,670 cervical cancer deaths will have occurred this year (according to the
National
Cancer Institute), there will have been 366,000 women killed by Heart Disease (that's 32% of all female deaths in America this year -- data
obtained from the
White House and corroborated with other
sites). Until I see definitive proof that Merck is not unleashing yet another drug with cardiovascular risks, I think I'd avoid the vaccine.
Condoms prevent HPV transmissions 70% of the time. And, for the record, abstinence works 100% of the time (and it's free).
I am by no means a hard-line anti-vaccine person. But from the high pressure advertising for Gardasil, you'd think that every woman in America is
going to develop cervical cancer within the hour, and that is simply not true. Very few women will get the disease (only 11,000 or so new cases out
of 151,000,000 or so American women) and fewer will die from it.
The FDA has screwed us over several times in the past (in conjunction with Merck quite a few times). I think it would be prudent to wait awhile
before suddenly beginning to take their word on anything again. The FDA pushed the diabetes drug
Troglitazone on to the market and later found out that it causes drug-induced hepatitis
and liver failure. They pushed Merck's anti-inflammatory drug
Rofecoxib (aka Vioxx) on to
the market and Merck itself withdrew it after the lawsuits started rolling in on the drug causing cardiovascular problems as well as liver failure
(and at least 2 deaths).
Lumiracoxib was also subsequently pulled from the market. There are
also doubts about the safety/usefulness of the
Hep-B vaccine for infants. The FDA, on a
routine basis, makes no safety studies of dietary supplements (hence the persistence of ephedrine on the market for so many years, which allowed for
an increase in meth production).
So pardon us if we don't give much of a crap about what the FDA says -- they have demonstrably proven over the years that we simply cannot trust them
without corroborating data from sources external to their organization. In 2006, the Union of Concerned Scientists conducted a survey and found that
the FDA pressured its scientists to exclude or alter scientific data related to the safety and effectiveness of various products. Of the 5,918 polled
FDA scientists, only 997 responded, and 18.4% (that's nearly one-fifth, or approximately 184) of the respondents reported that they "have been
asked, for non-scientific reasons, to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information or their conclusions in a FDA scientific document" --
40% of the respondents "fear retaliation for voicing safety concerns in public"
(
source). I highly recommend reading that information, since there
are other statistics that I did not quote.
/tn.
[edit on 27-12-2007 by teleonaut]
