So far, so good: City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito should be applauded for turning a personal difficulty — testing positive for the Human Papillomavirus, which can cause cervical cancer — into a campaign to alert women (in particular, minority women) about the need for regular gynecological care.
But the speaker should not become an HPV-vaccine evangelist, spreading the gospel that children should be vaccinated.
Mark-Viverito has so far drawn the right lesson. After all, HPV isn’t the only threat to a woman’s health.
Several years ago, I learned of a woman who became severely ill and nearly died because she’d forgotten to remove her IUD. It had been in place for over 10 years and a deadly infection had set in.
What went wrong? After a health-insurance mix-up, she stopped doing regular GYN visits.
If she’s inspired to continue her campaign, Mark-Viverito would do well to urge women to get regular annual medical check-ups as well.
Many immigrant women (notably Hispanics and Muslims) need culturally sensitive outreach and medical care. They should be given the choice of gynecological care by female doctors.
The city Health Department should do public-service ads encouraging reproductive and gynecological health care. We should also encourage academically strong women and girls to become primary care physicians and gynecologists.
But mandating HPV vaccination of children — as some urge — would be a big mistake.
Almost 20 million Americans are infected with HPV. Today, the vaccine is recommended for young girls and women, ages 9 to 29. Gardasil, an HPV vaccine, is also approved for preventing anal cancers in males in the same age range.
But it’s less than it sounds. Of the 100-plus types of HPV, at least 15 of them are cancer-causing. Gardasil only targets 2 strains: HPV-16 and HPV-18.
Yet the vaccine was pushed to market faster than any before, with a record-short period of review by the federal Food and Drug Administration. No commonly administered vaccine is more expensive.
Informed and involved parental consent is vital, since the HPV vaccine has several known side effects:
severe allergic reactions that can involve difficulty breathing, wheezing, skin rash, itching or hives — as well as diarrhea, nausea, pain at the injection site, fever, fainting, dizziness, swollen glands and joint pain.
The growing rate of HPV infection in young girls is indeed alarming. But while the vaccine may help slow that increase, the methods used to encourage it must be closely monitored.
As far back as 2007, bills were introduced in the Legislature to push HPV immunization.
One sought to mandate it as a prerequisite for girls’ school enrollment; another would let minor girls get vaccinated without parental consent, even allowing family-planning agencies to administer the vaccine as part of an STD regime.
In 2009, Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, D-Scarsdale, and state Sen. Liz Krueger, D-Manhattan sponsored another no-parental-consent bill.
Sorry: Allowing minors to make medical decisions by themselves is not commendable — even in the name of preventing cancer.
It’s important that parents become fully educated about HPV before having their daughter or son vaccinated. The risks are too high to blindly force the vaccine on children behind their parents’ back.
New Yorkers aren’t prepared to make parents irrelevant in their young daughters’ health-care decisions — and we shouldn’t let ideology or pharmaceutical-company money push lawmakers into end-running that principle.
Adult women should heed Mark-Viverito’s advice about getting regular GYN care — but we shouldn’t let a wise campaign transform into a foolish one.