Gardasil | Imamother

southernbubby

Wed, Aug 28 2019, 12:59 am

123Smile wrote:

Is it mandatory now in NY?

I hope that it won't be because I think that in fairness to anti-vaxers, the mandate should apply to those infectious diseases that could spread at school.
Many frum people want to give their kids Gardasil.

JoyInTheMorning

Wed, Aug 28 2019, 8:07 am

amother [ Linen ] wrote:

HPV is an STD. Why would you give it to your frum preteen? My Obgyn who has seen 1000s of women said that he has never seen a case of cervical cancer in a frum woman. Also, I know of too many girls who have had bad reactions to gardasil. I would definitely hold off on this one!

And because he hasn't seen it, it doesn't exist? What an incredibly stupid thing for a doctor/scientist to say. What about frum women who became frum after college, when they were likely to have had multiple partners, who could have had HPV? Just because such women don't come to his practice doesn't mean they don't exist. We don't know what the statistics on HPV for those women are.

JoyInTheMorning

Wed, Aug 28 2019, 8:09 am

amother [ Slateblue ] wrote:

Do you put all frum teens on BC because rape happens? Or can we assume that frum teens don't need BC?

The important difference is this: If a girl is ch"v raped, she can after the fact take Plan B (birth control which prevents implantation). If Plan B doesn't work, abortion is a possibility. But once someone is infected with HPV, there's no going back. You can't uninfect someone.

JoyInTheMorning

Wed, Aug 28 2019, 8:18 am

Goldy1 wrote:

I am sorry to hear that your friend died of cervical cancer. I wonder if she went for annual pap smears bec if she did, then it should/would have been caught at the pre-cancerous stage.

As southernbubby and others have pointed out, HPV doesn't only cause cervical cancer. It can cause cancer of the mouth and throat. From the CDC: "HPV is thought to cause 70% of oropharyngeal cancers in the United States."

This is thought to happen through oral sex, but the means of transmission are still not understood, so even if you can smugly say to yourself that you are sure that your son and daughter would never engage in oral sex (as if you can predict that or control that), you still don't know that abstention from oral sex would prevent this kind of cancer in someone who has been infected with HPV.

JoyInTheMorning

Wed, Aug 28 2019, 8:19 am

amother [ Slategray ] wrote:

I’m pushing off giving to my kids bec I heard it causes infertility

Nothing like "I heard it causes" (in the absence of any further evidence) as a good reason to do or refrain from a medical procedure.

southernbubby

Wed, Aug 28 2019, 8:23 am

JoyInTheMorning wrote:

Wouldn't those statistics be the same as for the general public?

JoyInTheMorning

Wed, Aug 28 2019, 9:18 am

southernbubby wrote:

Wouldn't those statistics be the same as for the general public?

Somewhat lower, I would think, than the general population, but still higher than for a population of FFB women, the vast majority of whom don't have sex before marriage.

My point was just that it's ludicrous for a doctor to remark on his never having observed a frum woman with cervical cancer, as if to say that it never happens.What the point is of such a remark is beyond me. Remind me not to go to this ob-gyn. (It won't happen. I'm OOT and would never, ever go to a frum ob-gyn unless he were the only person around. Imagine meeting him in shul. Yuck. JMO)

dancingqueen

Wed, Aug 28 2019, 9:38 am

Goldy1 wrote:

To hotpink and others: very important...all the literature says that you STILL have to get annual pap smears even with the vaccine bec the vaccine only covers HPV that is responsible for 70 percent of cervical cancers. that means 30 percent of cervical cancers have nothing to do with the HPV types in the vaccine.

Read more carefully. the current vaccine protects against 16 and 18, which cause 70% of Cervical cancer, plus 5 other cancer causing types and 2 wart causing types.

https://www.cancer.gov/about-c.....cines

southernbubby

Wed, Aug 28 2019, 10:42 am

amother [ Linen ] wrote:

Joy in the Morning, herein lies the difference. You will give medical procedures until proven dangerous, while I won't give any medical procedure until proven safe.

For people who are likely to be promiscuous, who is to say that contracting HPV is safer when thousands die of this every year and about 10 times that many are treated for these cancers?
I do agree that it should not be mandated for school attendance since a child who has not been given Gardasil is no threat to the health of the other students during the school day.

Chayalle

Wed, Aug 28 2019, 10:45 am

amother [ Linen ] wrote:

He is actually a non jewish ob/gyn who sees a lot of frum women in his practice. :-).

I think it's ludicrous for a doctor to say there is no risk for something just because he hasn't seen it.

JoyInTheMorning

Wed, Aug 28 2019, 11:22 am

amother [ Linen ] wrote:

Joy in the Morning, herein lies the difference. You will give medical procedures until proven dangerous, while I won't give any medical procedure until proven safe.

Nope, not true. I think the notions of "proven dangerous" and "proven safe" are ridiculous. It's hard to definitively prove things one way or the other. What you can do is gather evidence and make a risk-benefits analysis given the available data.

I'm actually extremely cautious with regard to medical procedures; cautious to a fault. I hear 1% risk of adverse effects and I want to run the other way. But 1 in a million (.0001%) risk for ginormous benefits? Count me in.

I've said this before: I'm a huge medical skeptic. And I base my skepticism not on "I heard", or "I read" on some ridiculous quack's website, or "I read" on some retracted article initially published by some predatory journal; but on high-quality articles based on well-designed studies and published in solid journals with good peer-review policies and high-impact factors. But regarding vaccines, I have a very high degree of confidence that the benefits hugely outweigh the risks.