Fighting For A Fighting Chance: The Gardasil Controversy

Imagine your mom, your sister, or your best friend sitting you down this weekend at lunch. "I have something to tell you," she says. "I have cervical cancer." Your mind races through emotions - sadness, fear, anger - and you mentally calculate how long before you can get on the Internet and start googling all about cervical cancer. When you do hit up the information superhighway, the news isn't great. Although five year relative survival rates are up, now to about 72% overall, the disease is still quite devastating. Survivors can expect treatment to include a combination of surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy, all of which can come with serious side effects, including reduced or eliminated fertility. You do the math on survival statistics, have a margarita, accompany your mom/sister/friend to the hospital, light some candles and hope for the best.

What if, though, 70% to 80% of those conversations could be avoided? It's possible that science has finally produced a way to nearly eliminate cervical cancer. Presently, it's estimated that 70 - 80% of cervical cancer cases are caused by HPV, or the human papilloma virus. The most common sexually transmitted infection, HPV is present in about 80% of American women by the age of 50. Gardasil, a new vaccine, prevents four strains of HPV, which account for about 70% of all cancers. Widespread vaccination efforts of pre-teen girls could potentially eliminate or at least drastically reduce cervical cancer within a generation.

So what's the hold up? Gardasil was approved in June of 2006, and has been on the market since then for girls and women between the ages of 9 and 26. Merck, the makers of the vaccine, were seeking to expand approval for women ages 26 to 45, as well as boys and men, but the FDA denied that request last week, citing concerns that could not be resolved in the approval time frame. Merck plans to respond to the FDA by the end of July and try again.

In the meantime, the vaccine has run into other problems. Some religious conservatives have opposed vaccinations because they believe it will encourage promiscuity in teen girls, and one group has used reports of side effects to bolster its claim of the vaccine's danger. We did a little digging and went to a country that's been using Gardasil for much longer than the U.S. to find out - was Gardasil unsafe? Kate Benson and Ian Munro of Australia's Sydney Morning Herald report that there have been very few complaints in Australia. Indeed, they uncover that the conservative groups opposing vaccination may be manipulating the data to imply causality that does not exist.

So if you can't get Gardasil, what can you do? Make sure you get your yearly pap test to detect HPV and cervical cancer. If you are uninsured and living in Illinois, you may be eligible for free cancer screenings from the Illinois Breast and Cervical Cancer Program. Don't delay - every day a cancer is undected is a a day wasted!