Dorsett touts NC’s new cancer-prevention law
Submitted by Jerimee on Tue, 06/05/2007 - 3:06pm
North Carolina’s new cervical cancer prevention law will help ensure that parents get the information they need about the disease, its causes and related vaccines, Sen. Katie Dorsett said today.
“It is our responsibility to make sure that families have the knowledge they need to make informed decisions about their children’s health,” Dorsett said. “I am confident that this law will help prevent cancer through better awareness and education.”
Senate Bill 260 requires that information about cervical cancer, cervical dysplasia, human papillomaviris and vaccines available to prevent the disease be made available to public schools, private religious schools, qualified nonpublic schools and home schools.
The legislation, which was sponsored by Dorsett and received overwhelming support in the General Assembly before being signed into law this weekend, requires the information to be distributed to parents of children enrolled in public schools in grades 5 – 12 at the beginning of the school year.
Cervical cancer is the second leading cancer killer of women worldwide. The American Cancer Society records over 11,000 cases of invasive cervical cancer in the U.S. each year. About 4,000 American women die each year from this disease, which is caused primarily by Human Papillomavirus (HPV).
HPV infects about 20 million people in the United States with 6.2 million new cases each year. There is no treatment for HPV, only treatment for related health problems such as cervical cancer.
Be on the lookout
for a concerted effort by the manufacturers of Gardasil (Merck) who have been pushing vigorously for a compulsory vaccination of all 8-12 year-olds for prevention of HPV.
We hashed this around on another site for a week or so. While their test results seem(ed) very promising, they were conducted on post-pubescent 16-24 year-olds, but their target population is pre-teens.
This bill seems like a great idea, as it is only information, but be on the lookout for future efforts to mandate vaccination. It needs to be available over-the-counter for a few years before we go crazy with it and (possibly) regret it down the road.
Information should be out there, to everyone.
And it should be offered in the language that the parent can understand the best.
At this point, with long term results of the vaccine not yet known, I am pleased that parents get the choice of whether to vaccinate or not. Still not sure what I would do if I had a daughter in that age category.
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How does this jive
with the abstinence-only theoconservatives who want no one to talk about sex at all?
I guess there'll be a lawsuit?
Scrutiny Hooligans - http://www.scrutinyhooligans.us
It's not talking about sex, Screwy.
It's talking about a disease.
Diseases are bad.
Sex is good.
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But the point of the vaccine
is that there's a connection between contracting HPV and having unprotected sex. Of course using condoms (the male or female version) would prevent HPV without any unknown side-effects, but while everybody's in favor of a vaccine, apparently nobody on the right is in favor of explaining to girls how to use a condom -- much less standing your ground if your boyfriend refuses to wear one. And when you start explaining to teenagers the alternatives to intercourse even the nicest conservative Democrats start to blanch.
As I said in another forum, Gardasil is essentially a vaccine against sex ed. Kudos to North Carolina for not taking the medicine.
I'm not against any kind of education.
My post was meant to be read in a very fakey innocent voice.
Couldn't you hear that? Sorry. :)
I am 100% behind parents - and young women, for that matter, having all the information they need to make good decisions about their sex lives and their health. If we give them information about HPV and the vaccine, we should also be giving them information about other sexually transmitted diseases, best methods for prevention besides abstinence only (with parental permission, I suppose), and let them make their choices.
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Sex education is critical,
and I think our former Surgeon General should be applauded for her efforts to promote...um, "self appreciation", but once this vaccine has some voluntary consumer time behind it, widespread usage should have a profound impact on cervical cancer down the road.
Plainly put? Until condoms can be trained to free themselves from their package, locate Mr. Johnson and roll themselves right on there, teenage exposure to HPV (and other STDs) is going to be a fact of life. If this vaccine performs (on the wider population) anywhere near as effectively as the clinical trials, we're talking about a huge drop in cervical cancer cases in the next decade or two.
As far as the abstinence crowd is concerned, treatment like this is anathema, because it takes some of the risk away from sex, along with their dour threats of what can happen when "lured" into carnality .