1.11.05

Theocrats to block anti-cancer drug because it could lead to teen sex

I'm all for respect in political discourse, but at what point do you throw up your hands and point out that these people are simply INSANE?

Money quote:

"Some people have raised the issue of whether this vaccine may be sending an overall message to teen-agers that, 'We expect you to be sexually active,' " said Reginald Finger, a doctor trained in public health who served as a medical analyst for Focus on the Family before being appointed to the ACIP in 2003.
"There are people who sense that it could cause people to feel like sexual behaviors are safer if they are vaccinated and may lead to more sexual behavior because they feel safe," said Finger.

This logic is so distorted that it boggles my mind. Treating HPV (the Human Pampilloma Virus) could lead to promiscuity - so therefore we shouldn't treat HPV? Even if there were a correlation between HPV treatments and more frequent sex, isn't the risk of CANCER more dangerous than teens getting it on safely?

Pharygula : his another take on this;

Money Quote:

"Here's a disease that kills about a third of the women who get it. It turns their reproductive tract into a nest of tumors that can spread and shut down the kidneys, metastasize to the lungs, the gut, everywhere, that sterilizes them and can cause horrible agony. The treatment involves radical hysterectomy, bilateral adnexectomy and lymphadenectomy, words I'd rather my family never even have to learn.

And it's preventable.

Yet these sick, evil people want to be able to hold this horrible disease as a threat to their daughters, their friends' daughters, their neighbors' daughters—they want to be able to say to their kids, "If you don't obey my rules, your womb will rot and dribble out your private parts, and you'll thrash in pain for a while before you die and go to hell." They like the idea of a disease that they can say is not prevented by condoms, so they can continue to preach abstinence with threats."

Andrew Sullivan also has a take on the Theocrats vs. HPV, but he goes further to inquire why it is that a microbicide gel has been developed to help women prevent HIV infection, but not gay men?

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