The AP reports that the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended today that 11 and 12 year-old girls are routinely vaccinated against HPV, and that the vaccine can be administered to girls as young as 9 at a doctor’s discretion.
The committee’s vote was unanimous, with two of the 15 members abstaining because of they have worked on Merck-funded studies. The committee also voted to add the HPV vaccine to the coverage list for the federal Vaccines for Children program, which pays for immunizations for uninsured and underinsured children.
If you remember, the article in Nerve I posted about yesterday pointed out how crucial it was that the committee recommend that the HPV vaccine should be added to the coverage list for the federal Vaccines for Children program:
ACIP also recommends whether a vaccine should be included in the Vaccines for Children program, run by the CDC. (This is crucial if poor people — those most at risk for sexually transmitted diseases — are to get the vaccine. The Vaccines for Children program supplies vaccinations to Medicaid, the uninsured and some underinsured patients, but only if the CDC designates it as recommended.)
On a more local note, it seems that a school district in Arizona is currently grappling with the sex ed issue. According to the article, the sex ed curriculum would continue to be abstinence based, but would provide students in 6-8th grades with additional information on STD transmission. The school board has postponed a decision on updating the curriculum.
The Roanoke Times publishes an op-ed on HPV. Below is a snippet:
There is a misguided concern that by giving the vaccine to girls it will somehow give them the idea that it is OK to engage in sex, and that it will counter the message that parents wish to promote with their daughters: sexual abstinence until marriage and sexual faithfulness thereafter.
The thought is that virginity and monogamy offer complete protection. And it would if no one deviated from that plan. In the real world, people mess up.
Parents who worry that this vaccination extends permission for their daughters to act promiscuously should ask themselves: If a vaccine to prevent lung cancer were developed, would I hesitate to protect my child because she would think it’s OK to smoke?
Wouldn’t I consider that she might not ever smoke but still be exposed to the carcinogens through other’s actions? Wouldn’t I want to protect her?
And NOW has a piece about whether or not the Administration supports birth control. Here are some of the highlights:
At a May 26, 2005, press briefing, radio talk show host Les Kinsolving pressed then-White House press secretary Scott McClellan to confirm whether or not President Bush opposes contraception. McClellan doggedly avoided the question, and never provided a legitimate answer.
This evasion inspired Representative Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., who led 43 other members of Congress in writing letters to Bush asking him to clarify whether or not he supported birth control.
The response from the White House came via the Department of Health and Human Services as follows:
Thank you for your letter to President Bush to request his views on access to birth control. The President has asked that I respond on his behalf.
This Administration supports the availability of safe and effective products and services to assist responsible adults in making decisions about preventing or delaying conception.
The Department of Health and Human Services faithfully executes laws establishing Federal programs to provide contraception and family planning services. The Title X Family Planning Program and Medicaid are each significant providers of family planning services.
Additionally, this Administration strongly supports teaching abstinence to young people as the only 100 percent effective means of preventing pregnancy, HIV, and sexually transmitted infections (STIs).
Sincerely yours,
John O. Agwunobi
Assistant Secretary for Health
While at first glance this letter appears to show support for contraception, upon closer inspection, the letter seems more like a non-response from an administration which opposes abortion, and rarely (if ever) supports birth control. It refers to “safe and effective products and services” (as opposed to contraception) that prevent or delay “conception” (rather than pregnancy) for “responsible adults.” Apparently less-than-responsible adults are not entitled to these same “products and services,” while young people should be denied accurate and complete information about birth control and safe sex.
It’s been a couple days since I last posted. But I’m back with a round-up of recent sex ed/ab-only news:
Jessica Valenti of Feministing writes an interesting article for AlterNet on how the double standard of abstinence-only education threatens girls’ health:
The sexist theme that seems to come up the most often in these classes is that girls just don’t like sex, and therefore their main “job” is to keep boys, who do like sex, from getting any.
And this return to traditional gender roles is not just being pushed in our schools… Oddly, there are no Mother-Son purity balls.
Recently conservative organizations and abstinence educators have turned their focus to the debate over the new HPV vaccine–yet again, something that will overwhelmingly affect young women.
Under the guise of helping young people, abstinence education is actually putting girls’ health and lives at risk. For these programs, “purity” is not about sex, health or even happiness. It’s about a return to “traditional” gender roles at any cost.
Nerve has an article about the HPV controversy and the opposition’s softening of its position against the vaccine.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is a fifteen-member panel that advises the CDC on which vaccines should be recommended nationwide. Their decisions have a significant effect on whether private insurers will pay for the vaccine. ACIP also recommends whether a vaccine should be included in the Vaccines for Children program, run by the CDC. This is crucial if poor people - those most at risk for sexually transmitted diseases - are to get the vaccine. It’s the Vaccines for Children program that supplies vaccinations to Medicaid, the uninsured and some underinsured patients, but only if the CDC designates it as recommended. The ACIP meets June 29th to make recommendations to the CDC on the HPV vaccine. The CDC traditionally follows the ACIP’s advice. Also traditional is for states, individually, to adopt the ACIP vaccination advice and to require any recommended vaccine for public school admission. School vaccination requirements are widely accepted as the most effective way to ensure the greatest number of children are immunized.
The AIDS Taskforce of Greater Cleveland calls on the Ohio Department of Health to review abstinence-only-until-marriage curricula and ensure that misleading claims that imply condoms afford little or no protection against HPV be removed in light of new research.
Finally, the Lansing State Journal reports that the middle school health curriculum just got a little more comprehensive.
The Selma Enterprise in CA reports that students in the Selma Unified School District will now be able to take the abstinence-only program Making a Difference:
DeLeon said she likes to call the HIV and STD portions of the program “Scared Straight,” meaning that students are often scared straight when they realize how far-reaching the long-term consequences of STDs can be, and how their lives may be affected down the road.
Liberal Oasis has a great post on HPV and the study that came out today.
The post features a great quote from Katha Pollitt:
Christian conservatives have a special reason to be less than thrilled about the HPV vaccine. Although not as famous as chlamydia or herpes, HPV has the distinction of not being preventable by condoms. It’s Exhibit A in those gory high school slide shows that try to scare kids away from sex, and it is also useful for undermining the case for rubbers generally–why bother when you could get HPV anyway? In 2000, Congressman (now Senator) Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who used to give gruesome lectures on HPV for young Congressional aides, even used HPV to propose warning labels on condoms. With HPV potentially eliminated, the antisex brigade will lose a card it has regarded as a trump unless it can persuade parents that vaccinating their daughters will turn them into tramps, and that sex today is worse than cancer tomorrow.
Note that Valenti also posts for Feministing (she’s always right on the mark).
An article in this morning’s New York Times reports that the consistent use of condoms protects against HPV.
In the study, which independent experts said was the most conclusive to examine the role of condoms in preventing infection with the virus, women whose male partners used condoms every time they had sexual intercourse had less than half the rate of infection as did women whose partners used condoms less than 5 percent of the time.
Although the Food and Drug Administration recently licensed a human papillomavirus vaccine that is widely expected to prevent many warts and female cancers, the findings of the study are important because the vaccination protects against just four strains of human papillomavirus.
The issue has been controversial because a number of earlier studies of condoms and human papillomavirus produced conflicting findings about the degree of protection that condoms offered women.
If you remember, back in November 2005 the FDA issued draft language for condom labels that said condoms “greatly reduce, but do not eliminate” the risk of pregnancy and HIV infection when used correctly during sexual intercourse and that they provide “less protection” from other STDs, including HPV. These draft guidelines were issued after Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) and Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) questioned CDC and FDA statements in August 2003 that condoms can reduce the risk of transmission of HPV. According to Coburn, the HPV epidemic is growing “because people continue to deny the fact that condoms aren’t effective in reducing it.” He added, “You can have 100% condom use in this country and you would still have HPV.”
But Souder and Coburn weren’t happy with the FDA’s draft guidelines and believed that they overstated condoms’ effectiveness at preventing HPV: “This is speculation rather than scientific fact and is misleading,” Coburn said in a statement, adding, “Such claims of protection should not be made without conclusive scientific data”
Do you think this study will sway Coburn and Souder?
The Detroit Free Press publishes a letter to the editor from the medical director of an adolescent HIV/AIDS program in Detroit that says “Education is the best defense against AIDS.”
I support encouraging the delaying of sexual activity in youth so that they are mature enough to make good and independent decisions as well as decreasing the risks of multiple partners. However, the reality of our society is that the majority of people will engage in sex before marriage, and they need to know how to protect themselves from pregnancy and HIV/STDs. It is also true that women, especially, get infected from their husbands even if they were not sexually active before marriage. It is our responsibility as adults to teach our teens from a medical and scientific perspective, and not from a judgmental and moral stance.
The AP reports that a group in Arizona is using dance to promote abstinence until marriage and taking that message to Kampala, Uganda in July.
On July 14, BreakDown will travel to Kampala, Uganda, where it will connect with a pastor and try to educate Ugandans about finding God and waiting until marriage to have sex.
Though they will not be promoting the use of condoms, group members hope their message, which is also anti-abortion, will help reduce the spread of the HIV virus that causes AIDS.
The Portales News-Tribune has an article about a local ab-only program in Lindsey, New Mexico that contains a very sobering quote:
“This is an abstinence-only course. Some of the kids asked about condoms, but we can’t talk to them about that.”
More than half of Lindsey’s 300-plus students participated in the federally funded Worth the Wait program during the spring semester, according to Theti.
SIECUS has some quotes from the high school curriculum for Worth the Wait:
Worth the Wait asks students to sign the following pledge: “Starting today, I ________ (name) pledge to abstain from sexual activity until marriage, as this is the only proven way to protect myself from out-of-wedlock pregnancy and STDs. I am Worth the Wait.” (Worth the Wait, Section 8-43)
“Research has shown that teenagers who sign abstinence pledges are much less likely to have intercourse.”” (Worth the Wait, Section 8-43)
Worth the Wait’s lesson on contraception is entitled “Why Contraceptives are not the Answer for Teens.”
“Males will often have their first intercourse experience with a woman to whom he feels no particular attachment while females tend to have their first sexual experience with a man they love and may want to marry.” (Worth the Wait, Section 5-11)
“Males typically felt their female partners expected some form of materialism (e.g. dinners, entertainment) in exchange for sex.” (Worth the Wait, Section 5-11)
“Couples who cohabitate: value marriage less; do not want to be responsible for one another; are less faithful to their partner than married couples; are not as happy; [and] are more likely to get divorced.” (Worth the Wait, Section 8-35.10)
I love this story!!
Right on the heels of yesterday’s post about 100 REAL hot women comes an amazing story out of the Bronx about girls in PS 218 advocating for sex ed classes and winning!
The NY Post article yesterday on this story has also has some great quotes:
“The only sex education we have is music videos, the Internet and books because our parents don’t talk about it with us and we don’t get it in school,” said Ashley Reyes, 13, who with her friends collected 206 signatures from classmates and peers.
Sex is such a taboo topic at PS 218, the girls claim, that the school has not even launched a state-mandated HIV/AIDS curriculum because of complaints from parents. The school did not return phone calls for comment.
These girls live in a borough where, according to the city Health Department, 12.8 percent of teenage girls become pregnant. Five of the 10 girls said they know a teenager who got pregnant.
Katherine George, 13, who helped write the petition in an after-school program run by the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corp. (WHEDCo), said “abstinence only” lessons just don’t cut it.
“Teaching kids abstinence makes them more intrigued,” George said. “Your mom can tell you, ‘Don’t take a cookie from the cookie jar,’ but you still want the cookie.”
And to think that this effort was launched by 12 and 13 year olds!
*not to be confused with my earlier post on the REAL Act.
Feministing announced its list of the REAL hot 100 women of 2006 (and not a moment too soon because Maxim’s idea of promoting women is blowing them up over the desert.) Anyway, the list features a sexual health educator from Oregon. Check it out.
The Caspar Star Tribune published a letter to the editor earlier this month from Linda Burt, the Executive Director of the ACLU of Wyoming, about a recent abstinence-only-until-marriage event in Natrona County put on by the group WAIT Training.
WAIT Training was one of the 13 curricula reviewed in the Waxman Report and is included in the report’s list of 11 curricula that contain major errors and distortions of public health information as well as gender stereotypes.
Some examples from the Waxman Report’s findings on WAIT Training:
“[WAIT Training] erroneously includes ‘tears’ and ’sweat’ in a column titled ‘At risk’ for HIV transmission.”
“[WAIT Training] defines ’sexually transmitted infections’ as ‘bacterial infections that are acute and usually can be cured’ and defines ’sexually transmitted diseases’ as ‘infections that are viral in nature, chronic, and usually can not be cured, but rather controlled through treatment.’ In fact, these terms are used interchangeably in medicine, and the program’s definitions are not widely accepted.”
“[WAIT Training] lists ‘Financial Support’ as one of the ‘5 Major Needs of Women,’ and ‘Domestic Support’ as one of the ‘5 Major Needs of Men.’ The curriculum states: ‘Just as a woman needs to feel a man’s devotion to her, a man as a primary need to feel a woman’s admiration. To admire a man is to regard him with wonder, delight, and approval. A man feels admired when his unique characteristics and talents happily amaze her.’”
“[WAIT Training] teaches that men are sexually aggressive and lack deep emotions. In a chart of the top five women’s and men’s basic needs, the curriculum lists ’sexual fulfillment’ and ‘physical attractiveness’ as two of the top five ‘needs’ in the men’s section. ‘Affection,’ ‘Conversation,’ ‘Honesty and Openness,’ and ‘Family Commitment’ are listed only as women’s needs.”
Clearly WAIT Training has some problems.
And then today I come across an article in the Journal Star out of Lincoln, Nebraska saying that WAIT training has been all over Nebraska.
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