Wednesday, May 9, 2007
HPV Vaccine Getting Smacked Around Again
filed under: Smart. Safe. Sex. by Melissa Gira
Oh, HPV vaccine, it’s been a hard year. People accused you of making girls slutty, like in Texas, where efforts to make you mandatory for girls aged 11 and 12 are stalled in the State Legislature. Now the Los Angeles Times says you “may be less effective than previously thought,” though of course, many, many other headlines on this same study in the New England Journal of Medicine (who, just to make things extra complicated, has this editorial on why mandatory vaccinations make sense) resound with optimism that you are curing cervical cancer.
Just in time, though, a new ill to pin on HPV: throat cancer. Shocking to absolutely no one who counsels people about their sexual behavior, the virus formerly known only as “the virus that causes genital warts and some strains of cervical cancer,” is now believed to cause oral cancers as well. We appreciate that science does have a few more miles to go before it can definitively come to the same conclusions as community health educators — that people fuck with mouths too, hello — and that the media can’t decide if all the new HPV news is good (yay, cure for cancer) or bad (but look out for the new cancer) might be heartening, as well, if it weren’t all going down in the context of a culture largely sans sanity around safer sex. The takeaway message could be, unless couched in real people’s sex lives, yet again, sex is nasty and dangerous and involves unavoidable risk.
Is it naive to hope that there’s a way to report on sexual infections and not prop up sex-negativity?
Comments
Leave a Comment
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
It looks that also the way the numbers are shown is strictly functional to carry the “sex is bad” message.
from today’s Washington Post article: “Those subjects who had had one to five oral-sex partners were 3.8 times as likely as those with fewer oral-sex partners to have it, whereas those who had more than six oral-sex partners were 8.6 times as likely.”
How “have fewer than one to five partners” should be interpreted? HPV spreads with sexual activity, and the study shows that is connected with throat and cervical cancer, but the 3.8 and 8.6 figures have a VERY limited statistical meaning.
They are just functional to say (not that subliminally): to have oral sex causes cancer. Again.
[…] HPV Vaccine Getting Smacked Around Again : Sexerati: Smart Sex. “Is it naive to hope that there’s a way to report on sexual infections and not prop up sex-negativity?” […]