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I've been trying to understand the flap this week over the recommendations from the U.S. Preventive Task Force—a group ill-prepared to handle the controversy—to
delay routine mammograms to age 50 for most women. And now, in a truly
terrible coincidence of timing, we have a second round of commotion
over the advice of the American College of Obstetricians and
Gynecologists to push pap smears to screen for cervical cancer back to age 21 ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)
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Jess, I'm glad you brought up the Gardasil news. I'm amazed (if not surprised) by how different the rhetoric surrounding boys getting it is. A while back, I wrote about the totally bizarre idea that an HPV vaccine for girls would somehow promote promiscuity. As you may remember, this was the conservative critique opponents of the HPV vaccine: Having one would turn girls into sluts, and even allowing your teen daughter to getone somehow besmirched her purity. Never mind that according to the National Cancer Institute nearly 3700 women die a year of cervical cancer, which sometimes develops from the HPV virus; implicit in the opponents' critique was the idea that it was only "loose" girls who got HPV. (And I guess they don't matter as much. Or, serves them right.)
What was so strange was how the conservative firestorm somehow ignited another kind of anxiety, one more typically associated with crunchy liberal types: namely, vaccine anxiety. When Gardasil began to be administered, there were widespread reports of group fainting fits among the girls who received it. And so even liberals began to wary about the drug. I can't help but feel that the liberal anxiety grew out of the conservative one, partly because teenage girls, so quick to internalize external cues, were picking up on the fact that this particular vaccine had...drama at the heart of it. Every vaccine produces a few adverse reactions in those to whom it's administered; but in this case, those adverse reactions were being magnified, it seems, by the reactions of parents primed to be nervous about the vaccine, and by suggestible teenage girls who (in some cases, at least) had more of a psychosomatic response than a purely physical one.
The libertarian in me at times resists the idea of making any vaccine mandatory. But this vaccine will save women's lives. Cancer is not pretty. And it would be awful if our collective squeamishness about female adolescent sexuality meant that this vaccine never became as effective as it could be. To me, the great irony is this: We have been trying to come up with vaccines for cancer for decades. We have spent millions of dollars doing so. Now we found one. And no one wants to use it. Is teen sexuality that scary?