My friend Sue Olivieri died of cervical cancer when she was 29 years old. We were graduate students together at the University of Arizona. I got to graduate; she didn’t.
By the time the cancer was detected, it had already spread. First, they removed her uterus. I will always remember the look on her face when she said, afterwards, “I feel so empty.” A friend of mine visited Sue at her family’s house in New York, where she spent her final months. In the end, she was completely unrecognizable, and then she was gone.
Back in 1990, they didn’t know that cervical cancer was caused by a virus. The human papilloma virus (HPV) takes nearly a hundred forms, but the ones that do the most damage are HPV-16 and 18.
Astonishingly, 60 percent of women on one college campus tested positive for the virus during a three-year study. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that 80 percent of women will have been infected by the age of 50. HPV is sexually transmitted, and it’s everywhere.
Why, then, does cervical cancer affect just (just?) 370,000 women worldwide every year? Because the immune system keeps it under control in the majority of women. Sometimes, though, the virus hangs around, and years later it can trigger cancerous changes in the cells of the cervix, vagina and vulva.
The vulvar form of the disease affected another friend a couple of years ago. An invasive tumor was removed, along with the rest of her external genitalia. Talk about “female genital mutilation.”
In what is surely a historical medical breakthrough, the Merck pharmaceutical company developed a vaccine against HPV-16 and 18 and two other forms of HPV. Last week, Governor Rick Perry became the first governor to mandate vaccination of teenage girls.
The Christian conservatives in the Texas Legislature would have it otherwise. Despite the studies that show HPV is rampant, I guess they trust their daughters to abstain until marriage and think they’re going to marry virgins. It’s not good enough that they can opt out. They’d like the default to be no vaccination.
Sorry, but if that were the default, then we’d have more HPV, more cancer, more tragic deaths and more mutilations. No thanks.
But if we take our daughters in to be vaccinated, aren’t we giving them the green light to have sex? Not at all. The beauty of the mandate is that it makes the HPV shot like all the other childhood vaccinations. It’s just what we have to do, no messages attached.
I know some people suspect illicit connection between Perry and Merck, whose chief lobbyist in Austin is Perry’s former chief of staff. I’m not so cynical to wonder whether Perry really cares about saving lives. Mandating vaccinations for all girls is the right thing.
As soon as she’s old enough, I’ll be having my daughter vaccinated. When I do, I’m sure I’ll be thinking of Sue.
About the writer:
Jean Kazez is an adjunct in the philosophy department. She can be reached at [email protected].
