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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13794

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Gérvas J.
Human papillomavirus vaccines. Three decent proposals .
CMAJ 2008 Jun 13; epub
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/eletters/177/12/1527


Abstract:

Most developed countries have introduced human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines as a public health measure. But there are continuing doubts about the “real-world” effectiveness of the vaccine and I and others have called for a slower, more cautious approach, so far to no avail (1-5).

Cervical cancer is predominantly a problem in under-developed countries and among poor and marginalized females in rich countries. The major burden of the disease is in poor countries (in Latin America, the Caribbean, and eastern Africa), and these countries can not only not afford the costs associated with a public campaign of HPV vaccinations, but lack the infrastructure to support both mass immunizations — even with a reduced-price vaccine – and the Pap or other screening tests that are fundamental to a holistic cervical cancer prevention program.

Moreover, although marketing of the vaccines promises life-long protection from infection from the two viral types associated with about 70% of cases of cervical cancer, and “the beginning of the end of cervical cancer,” there are no published data to support these claims…


Notes:

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909