Skip to content
Home » Obamacare

Obamacare

HPV cancer vaccine

HPV cancer vaccine rates – Gardasil uptake remains low

As I’ve written before, there are precious few ways to prevent cancer. But one of the best cancer prevention strategies is the HPV vaccine, which can prevent numerous cancers such as cervical, oral, penile and anal, all serious, and all dangerous. Maybe we should just rename Gardasil to “HPV cancer vaccine,” which could make everyone sit up and notice.

The HPV vaccination rate remains depressingly low in the USA. According to recent research, 39.7% of adolescent girls aged 13-17 received all three doses of the vaccine in 2014 up from 37.6% in 2013. HPV vaccination rates among teen boys are much lower than for girls, 21.6% in 2014 up from 13.4% in 2013.

There are probably a lot of reasons for the low HPV cancer vaccine uptake rate, so I thought I’d go through the most “popular” ones, debunking them one by one.

Hopefully, the reader can use this article as a checklist of the tropes and myths of the anti-Gardasil crowd with quick answers to them. Maybe you’ll convince one person to get their son or daughter vaccinated against HPV related cancers.

Read More »HPV cancer vaccine rates – Gardasil uptake remains low

Bernie Sanders embraces alternative medicine and pseudoscience.

Bernie Sanders embraces alternative medicine – UPDATED

For regular readers of this blog, you know that I’m a progressive plus being a strong supporter of scientific evidence. I don’t spend a lot of time writing about politics, though I am a strong critic of the left when it comes to science. And it’s time call out a presidential candidate, who is not Donald Trump –  Bernie Sanders embraces alternative medicine which is not good for health care.

Senator Sanders is a self-proclaimed “socialist” or social democrat, although I doubt he would compare economically to real socialists or social democrats in Europe. His brother, a Green Party politician in the UK, probably would make a real socialist. He fits the crunchy liberalism of the state he represents, Vermont. These are generally the progressives I criticize the most – generally anti-vaccine, anti-GMO and pro-alternative medicine.

Sanders has promoted GMO labeling, a policy that will lead to increased food costs for those who least deserve to pay more for food.  For those of us who look only at science based evidence for claims, there is little difference between climate change deniers and GMO deniers.

Even though there is absolutely no evidence (unless cherry picking is your thing) that GMO foods are a health risk, individuals like Sanders push that trope to probably pander to his most liberal supporters. Or maybe Sanders embraces pseudoscience, because that’s his core belief. I’m beginning to wonder.

Read More »Bernie Sanders embraces alternative medicine – UPDATED

vaccine hate debate

Improving immunization rates – what can the Law do? 

Many of us are concerned at the rise of cases of preventable diseases and the role played in that by the decision by a minority of parents not to vaccinate their children. One question is what, if any, effects would legal tool have on improving immunization rates? This article attempts to map out the available tools.

Note that the focus of this article is what the law can do, not what the law should do. The fact that a legal tool is available – i.e. Constitutional, can be enacted or used by the courts – doesn’t automatically mean it should be. I would, in fact, argue that some of the tools discussed here shouldn’t be used in the context of immunization – in most circumstances, forced vaccination and criminal law are inappropriate. But mapping out what’s available seems like a useful first step in the discussion of what the law should do. The goal of this post is to provide a menu of options and a more or less logical way to classify them. My hope is that setting out what’s possible would help us think through what is desirable.

 

Read More »Improving immunization rates – what can the Law do?