Re: [UUPoly-L] more on gardasil

["Brigitte Fires" <brigittefires@gmail.com>]

it is approved for women ages 9 to 26. Now I don't know about anyone
else, but I consider most of that range to be "adult women,"
especially when you consider that women are frequently--nay,
commonly--starting puberty (and thus becoming a woman) by age 9.
Whether we agree with the mentality of most of that being women is a
completely different story (and FTR, I don't), but biologically
speaking that's pretty much all considered adult.

The original advertisement and vaccination wave was targeted toward
late teens and 20-somethings, then a few months later they started
campaigning the under-14 crowd. They wanted to get as many
currently-active people vaccinated as possible, to catch as many as
they could who hadn't contracted the virus yet, and then start getting
to the ones who haven't become active yet.

Also let's keep in mind here, if they're saying 80% of women will get
HPV IN THEIR LIFETIME, that's a LONG timeframe for someone to be
contracting the virus in. Even if we go from the age of consent
(MI=16) to average age of menopause (50?) that's still 44 years during
which you have an 80% chance of catching HPV AT SOME POINT. So even
targeting it at sexually active adult women, especially those younger
adult women who are more than likely not married (and thus presumably
monogamous), still makes sense, because they still have a high chance
of not having contracted HPV yet.

I could really do the match and figure out the statistics there, but I
don't think anyone will really care about the numbers. If anyone gets
bored, that could be an interesting chart. To find out your likelihood
of contracting HPV each year between the ages of 16 and 50, assuming
you haven't already...

On 13/02/2008, Valerie White <valerie@valeriewhite.org> wrote:
> to the best of my knowledge, Gardasil is not intended for adult women
> (unless they've lived in a convent since puberty).  A very large
> percentage of the population has it asymptomatically
> already.  Gardasil is targeted at 9 year old girls or thereabouts.
>