Health
Related: About this forumDrug Makers’ Push Leads to Cancer Vaccines’ Rise [Gardasil]
"The lightning-fast transition from newly minted vaccine to must-have injection in the United States and Europe represents a triumph of what the manufacturers call education and their critics call marketing. The vaccines, which offer some protection against infection from sexually transmitted viruses, are far more expensive than earlier vaccines against other diseases Gardasils list price is $360 for the three-dose series, and the total cost is typically $400 to nearly $1,000 with markup and office visits (and often only partially covered by health insurance).
Award-winning advertising has promoted the vaccines. Before the film Sex and the City, some moviegoers in the United States saw ads for Gardasil. On YouTube and in advertisements on popular shows like Law and Order, a multiethnic cast of young professionals urges girls to become one less statistic by getting vaccinated.
The vaccine makers have also brought attention to cervical cancer by providing money for activities by patients and womens groups, doctors and medical experts, lobbyists and political organizations interested in the disease, sometimes in ways that skirt disclosure requirements or obscure the companies involvement."...
In the United States, hundreds of doctors have been recruited and trained to give talks about Gardasil $4,500 for a lecture and some have made hundreds of thousands of dollars. Politicians have been lobbied and invited to receptions urging them to legislate against a global killer. And former state officials have been recruited to lobby their former colleagues.
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Diane Harper, a principal investigator on the clinical trials of Gardasil:
"Merck lobbied every opinion leader, womens group, medical society, politicians, and went directly to the people it created a sense of panic that says you have to have this vaccine now.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/20/health/policy/20vaccine.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
ellenrr
(3,864 posts)"Where there are Pap smear programs, few women die of cervical cancer. In the United States, it is responsible for 12,000 new cases a year and 3,600 deaths, most in women who did not get Pap smears, said Laurie Markowitz, head of the HPV working group at the C.D.C.
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"critics ask whether it is worth conducting a campaign on the scale of the one used against polio to eliminate a generally harmless virus."
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"HPV is nearly universal and generally benign. Eighty percent of people will contract it in their lifetime and most will clear it on their own."
(same article- New York Times)
kestrel91316
(51,666 posts)It's a pity.
If Farrah Fawcett were still alive I'd have you go chat with her.