Those Catholics in Canada have been acting up lately, haven't they?

YES

See also Dawkins' put-down of a certain Mr. Stanford .....
http://comment.independent.co.uk/letters/article2970799.ece
See the last paragraph of Prof. Dawkins' letter!

Oh, so only their husbands can give them the virus. That's okay then.

YES.

As an escapee from Catholicism, I carry an incredible load of guilt associated with sex. It has taken me decades to get over it. And here they are again, loading exactly the same guilt trip onto young women.

Somewhere in the New Testament, someone says something to the effect that Christians are unusual, or a marked out from others, because: "See how they love each other."

The un-loving nature of this call from Catholic schools is astounding. Obviously, it's far better for Catholic girls to get cervical cancer.

I'm getting that vaccination for my daughters as soon as it's available here in NZ.

I agree, it's a little crazy to worry about teens becoming looser with sex when you are basically inoculating them against a form of cancer.

To be fair though, I did see on Citytv news last night that the Canadian bishops signed a document to send home saying vaccination choices ultimately should be left to the parents. I think the main issue for the Catholic school board is that they do not want the vaccinations to be carried out in their school.

This will mean the government would have to offer the vaccines at an off-site location, which will cost more.

More here:
http://www.citynews.ca/news/news_14858.aspx
--
The Flying Trilobite
http://glendonmellow.blogspot.com

There is an aspect to this that intrigues me. It is licensed for use in girls, but HPV infects and affects both girls and boys. Of course the selling point about it is that it may prevent cervical cancer, so it seems reasonable to give it to girls at an age before they meet HPV. But a little thought reveals some other aspects:
Firstly, we could break the chain of transmission in two places by vaccinating boys as well as girls, thus eradicating the problem and protecting girls against cervical cancer more quickly. Doing this would also protect boys against genital warts, which usually aren't dangerous, but I doubt if anyone enjoys them. As it is, we aim to protect girls now, and boys later when there are no girls with HPV to catch it from. But there are two big problems with this approach. Firstly, it isn't generally appreciated that penile cancer is caused by HPV just like cervical cancer, and it does really happen. I have two patients in my rural Nova Scotian general practice with penile amputations as a result of penile cancer. We are delaying protecting against this as things stand. Secondly, there is a group of males who will never gain any protection against HPV by our policy of vaccinating girls only. Gay men will continue to get genital warts, penile cancer, and a devastating form of anorectal cancer which is also caused by HPV. This is particularly aggressive in individuals with co-existing HIV disease. You would think that as a gay health issue and an HIV-related issue, there would be a lot of protest about this, but there isn't the awareness of it yet in the relevant communities.
Whilst I usually decline to see drug representatives, I made an exception for the Pfizer rep out of curiosity, and was told the following: Gardasil is licensed for use in both sexes in Australia, and that Pfizer had not bothered to apply for such licensure in Canada, believing it would not only be rejected, but that it would harm the chance that it would be licensed for use in girls. You might take that with a pinch of salt, considering the tainted source. If it is true, we can thank Stephen Harper for bringing about that kind of atmosphere! As things stand, we are failing to protect girls as quickly as possible against genital warts and cervical cancer, delaying protection of heterosexual boys against genital warts and penile cancer unnecessarily, and absolutely failing to protect gay men at all against genital warts, penile cancer and anorectal cancer. I could understand a money argument against vaccinating all, accepting delayed protection for boys as penile cancer is rarer, but to exclude gay men entirely is against all conscience.
If that isn't bad enough, I read a report of a study that links oral cancer to HPV. We have traditionally attributed this to smoking (I am old enough to have been taught in medical school to answer in an exam ' sex (syphilis), spices, spirits, and smoking' - examiners loved the alliterative!) This study showed that smoking increased the risk seven times, but HPV in the mouth increased the risk thirty two times. I don't know about the US, but there are more cases of oral cancer than cervical cancer in Canada each year, and more deaths from it. This horrible disease affects both sexes. Wouldn't this make a good reason to use it more widely in the young?
And then there are all the 'moral' arguments. It occurred to me that a limerick my wife told me many years ago would be apposite:
There once was a young virgin so mild
Who kept herself pure and undefiled
By thinking of Jesus
Venereal diseases
And the dangers of having a child

It seems to me that anyone who cracks a smile at that - who can see what makes it humorous, is really someone who agrees with me that there is something ridiculous about failing to protect our youngsters against unpleasant and lethal diseases on the grounds that the vaccine will encourage sin or STD.

They are anti the HPV vaccine because they think that anyone who catches the virus by having sex deserves to be punished either through having the stress of funny smear test results to getting the cancer or seeing their wife/partner go through that.

I went to a Catholic High School in the UK, though we only had one teaching nun and the priests were occasional visitors, so I guess I may have missed out on the full guilt trip stuff.

I think it was during the highly emotive anti-choice presentation Q&A session that I realised that the Church doesn't actually like sex and thinks that people who have sex should be punished. I asked why they thought contraception was so bad when it could stop unwanted pregancies and abortions (which have to be worse than slipping a johnny on surely?) The answer I got was all contraception was wrong too. THAT made me realise that they were anti sex rather just anti abortion. That's when I stopped giving then even the time of day and started thinking seriously about what the church were teaching us about the position of women and the rest. So I suppose I should thank SPUC (Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child) for my early liberation into Atheism.

As I understand it, the current version of the HPV vaccine is not pushed for boys because it's nowhere near as effective for them, and has greater chance of serious side effects.

Firstly, we could break the chain of transmission in two places by vaccinating boys as well as girls

I recently heard (thanks to Dr Drew) that there is no vaccine available for males.

I think what's going on here is may be two-fold. First of all, the more common STDs are, the more people will decide to skip risky sex. The Church wants that. There is the off-setting problem of the consequences of getting the STD (which they wouldn't have gotten had the church advocated vaccination). You can think of it as simple accounting.

PremaritalSexBadness*IncidenceOfPremaritalSex + ConsequencesOfSTD*IncidenceOfInfection = UnitsOfBadness

If PremaritalSexBadness is zero, you're always going to go the vaccination route. However, as the value of PremaritalSexBadness goes up, while knowing a lack of vaccination will lower the IncidenceOfPremaritalSex, you could actually arrive at a place where "UnitsOfBadness" is higher when you do vaccination than if you didn't. Of course, that conclusion can ONLY be achieved if you consider PremaritalSexBadness > 0, and becomes particularly common if you perceive PremaritalSexBadness to be very high. Further, I think religious people don't have much trouble discounting the problems of STD infections because the people who suffer from them are disproportionately "the bad ones".

Which leads me to my second point: I think that religious people WANT people to suffer for their "wrongdoing". They want people who have premarital sex to have unplanned births (and I think opposition to abortion plays into this), and they want people who sleep around to suffer with STDs. You see, it's hard to prevent yourself from doing the wrong thing (having sex), and at least if you see some of those wrongdoers getting harmed by their actions, it's easier to justify "doing the right thing". I'm sure religious people are pleased with the fact that Paris Hilton and Pamela Anderson (those crazy, partying women) have STDs. They are "reaping what they sow", and provide an example of what the consequences of "that lifestyle" are.

On a similar note - let's not forget that the Catholic church was also telling Africans that condoms were no impediment to AIDS. (They were saying that the AIDS virus moves right through microscopic holes in condoms, and they provided no protection whatsoever.) Was the church trying to scare Africans into not having sex at all - by teaching them that condoms don't prevent the spread of AIDS?

Probably the same operative mindset that argued seatbelts should be banned because they encourage people to drive fast.

Wish there was a vaccine against religiosity!

Other than objective education, I mean.

"it's nowhere near as effective for them, and has greater chance of serious side effects."
Pardon ? Source?

I am a hard-core, boiled-egg atheist but, because of a Catholic upbringing (or "updragging" as I like to call it) I still cannot look at people making out on TV. I have to look away. Guilt sticks on me like rice on my socks the day after a Chinese-food dinner party. If god existed I would sue the bastard.

How exactly could they enforce that, anyway? Aren't medical records still confidential in this country, or did the Patriot Act(tm) get rid of that, too? I know that schools require proof of certain immunizations, but I don't think they can force parents to show off the entire immunization history other than that.

Would help if I noticed the big "CANADA" in the headline, wouldn't it? Note to self: never comment in the morning before having caffeine.

But hey, now I can pick another argument - you can't control dispensation of health care quite that easily in this country, it only works where you have OMG Teh Evil Socialized Medicine! Take that, fundie right-wing privatizers.

11/12: If you read the whole article, you'll see that by "ban the vaccine" they mean "ban public health department nurses from administering or counseling regarding the vaccine on school property". I have a feeling this will not stand up because in the Land of Socialized Medicine, the state also supports the Catholic school board -- if the courts have forced you to let gay couples go to prom, I think they will force you to allow vaccinations in your school too.

Hey...they finally decided to let them have it:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070919.whpv19/BNSt…

Now if only I can get my student union health plan to cover the costs...

But hey, now I can pick another argument - you can't control dispensation of health care quite that easily in this country, it only works where you have OMG Teh Evil Socialized Medicine!

That's a mark in favor of keeping the practice of medicine private - sure, it prevents you utterly reasonable folks from dictating what is permitted, but it also protects against crazed theocrats declaring what people can and cannot do.

My 16yo daughter was vaccinated at school for HPV a couple of months ago. No hesitation. If it was appropriately tested for use with males and accessible I would have my two boys (13, 11) vaccinated as well.

Carlie:
"How exactly could they enforce that, anyway? Aren't medical records still confidential in this country, or did the Patriot Act(tm) get rid of that, too? I know that schools require proof of certain immunizations, but I don't think they can force parents to show off the entire immunization history other than that."

If a medical practitioner prescribes 'off label' which they are allowed to do they lose certain legal protections if they are sued as a result of bad outcomes. Individual clinicians can always make such calls. But we are talking about a public vaccination campaign here and if it were done by THE GOVERNMENT can you imagine it? every adverse reaction, no matter how imaginary would be thrown on the tv screens and at the door of THE GOVERNMENT.

So if you set aside the likely political overtones of this one you can see that no public health measure is going to be so approved outwith a major emergency situation. Cervical cancer counts as that, penile cancer does not. But that is not the way you pitch this, you pitch it as something a good man does for his partner. A hygiene issue. Like washing under his foreskin, or simply washing.

Carlie, the issue is whether the schools should be providing the vaccinations, and definitely not whether the schools would ban those students who had received the vaccine privately.

Now the Catholic schools want to ban the HPV vaccine.

Overstated and out of date.

The article talked about one school board. It said only, "Halton's Catholic school board could become the first in Ontario to ban public health nurses from administering the HPV vaccine to young girls at local schools."

It also said that a decision would be made on Tuesday. The decision was made, and they accepted it.

"Is there something in those communion crackers that shorts out the logic circuits of the brain?

Maybe that explains why the Church has been so obsessively opposed to non-wheat hosts for celiac disease sufferers? (although apparently they've somehow made virtually gluten-free ones) (Amusingly, according to wikipedia, there simply isn't a similar institutional problem when it comes to Passover matzo and Jews: " . . . so oat matzo is used."

Hmm . . . in Hunsberger & Altemeyer's little bookAtheists: A Groundbreaking Study of America's Nonbelievers, the Canadian atheists come across as significantly more laid back and moderate than the Americans (although they note that the two groups weren't directly comparable) - it would be interesting to see if that changes if they're faced with more US-style christianist wingnuttery . . ..

Halton county is not exactly a seething pit of religiousity, I'm very, very suprised this even came up there. It's probably boredom, Burlington/Oakville is very much like a cemetary with lights.

Merrick will have the testing done on men in 2008 according to this interview.

Oh, so only their husbands can give them the virus. That's okay then.

Or their priest.

As if sex was the only way to get HPV...

... and as for the male version of the vaccine, well, cancer involving male genitals should never be discussed, let alone researched. Look at the funding for the study of breast cancer as opposed to testicular cancer. When sexism harms men it's invisible. Not that I'm opposed to early death for guys, I'm just saying.

But wait, there's something even MORE egregious--

"The ban could also prevent the health unit from counselling or giving advice on the vaccine to any student on board property."

It's one thing to refrain from providing a particular service in the nurse's office (not that I agree with the decision), but it's entirely indefensible to oppose rational public health education. I'm planning on moving to Canada after I finish school here, and you can bet I'll be agitating for disestablishment ;-p

Andy, that's standard for Catholic schools everywhere. The health educators at Boston College, where I'm enrolled, are forbidden from talking about condoms when discussing HIV prevention.

The Church must really like AIDS and HPV.

Let's just call this for what it is. The pro-cancer forces are fighting back. Liberals, atheists and secularists have been opposed to cancer long enough -- the federal government oppresses pro-cancer activities like smoking and extreme exposure to sunshine. Pro-cancer people have had it!

There are other diseases which can be spread by sex, too, which the pro-cancer forces are going to attack soon: Typhoid, measles, hepatitis (various forms), and influenza. If God meant people to have sex, God meant they should pay the price, the pro-cancer forces will argue.

To these idiots, any plague that was good enough for God to use on any ancient people as described in scripture is good enough to use today! Victims must be guilty of some sin, right? Let them take their punishment, the pro-cancer forces argue.

Besides, if we cured cancer and prevented 31-year-old mothers from grisly deaths, how would churches make money off of funerals? The pro-cancer forces argue,'It's not like old people die as often as they once did.'

In other news, the Catholic Church asks that the full force of the law be applied to anyone caught stealing pump handles.

Holy Mary, Jesus and God! Have these people no respect for human life?

The RCC continues to privilege the world hereafter over worldly concerns. They've opposed virtually every medical advance as 'interfering in God's plan,' or 'promoting sinful behavior.'

Maybe the Catholic hierarchy would accept a compromise? Y`know, the vaccine with the compulsory wearing of a chastity belt.

Apparently 1 in 10 girls under 16 in England have the HPV virus already. See:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7002887.stm

Errr, for those who are alluding to the notion that CAnada is trying to require HPV vaccinations under Teh Ebil Big Brother SocializedMedicine, this is far from the truth. For cost-effective delivery of a new immunization that they have deemed worth covering under the public health plan, rather than incur the costs of paying doctors for handling thousands of billable visits to administer the vaccine, they are providing clinics operated by public health nuirses in schools where their targeted demographic is.

There is no requirement for girls to take the vaccine, and indeed each minor girl will require a signed parental consent form to enter the clinic.

This is a process targetted towards saving costs of administration of a new vaccine, but people may still elect to have their daughters innoculated or not, and may also elect to do it at their doctor's office if they so choose. We just think that finding cost-effective ways of delivering health care where feasible makes sense.

We do the same thing with flu-shot clinics every fall rather than force doctors to deal with managing a huge influx of appointments simply to administer a single shot.

Why does the government even bother with the Catholic school system? It's basically a form of child abuse.
For that matter why don't churches pay taxes... oh the rants I could go on.

I hate how the media jumps on this stuff and makes it sound like there is actually some moral or ethical thing to debate here. The Catholic school board is trying to decide if they are pro-cancer or not -- is that what's happening?

Once in a while, promulgators of superstition (like, say, the catholic church), do something that makes it very clear that their ultimate motivation is misanthropy. (Or in this, case, misogyny.)

File next to the geriatrics in silly hats telling desperately poor people that condoms will send them to hell.

-jcr

"Have these people no respect for human life?"

You just asked whether a death cult has respect for human life? Seriously?

Come on, this outfit is all about glorifying suffering in exchange for rewards after death.

-jcr

I was reading the comments to the Globe and Mail article linked earlier in the thread, and at first I was quite surprised by the quality of the comments - people understanding that it's about preventing cancer, rather than preventing sex. As they went on though, the quality dropped considerably in terms of coherence, and near the end was of course "Vaccines are eeevil. They even put mercury! in them. They poison young, delicate children" (paraphrased to be cruel).

I really don't get this - so it reduces the chance of cervical cancer. It's not like we've already eliminated AIDS, syphilis, gonorrhea, genital herpes... There's already plenty of ways to die from sex, along with plenty of other ways to die in general. Reducing cancer is a good thing, dammit.

Come on, don't you all see? If we vaccinate these girls then we can't use the threat of cervical cancer to scare them out of having sex. It makes perfect sense to me.

Pure evil. What the hell is wrong with these people?

"Come on, don't you all see? If we vaccinate these girls then we can't use the threat of cervical cancer to scare them out of having sex. It makes perfect sense to me."

Because, we know now that there are countless girls out there who want to give up the booty but won't because they might get cervical cancer...

You are right. The Catholic Church just wants to prevent the vaccine because they can use cervical cancer as a threat. Hasn't happened yet, but they want to reserve the right...

Don't laugh, PZ. The stupid is here, too.

Go to www.whitehouse.gov and follow the links to the "faith based initiatives" and if you dig around there's a PDF file of all the recipients of the taxpayer's $3 billion largesses.

I couldn't get more than a few pages through it, because I was puking all over my keyboard, and laser-beams of rage were burning holes in my monitor - but just from the first page I was able to add up Over $400 million dollars of taxpayers' money spent to promote abstinence among teen-agers

Teh stupid! It burns!

Along these same lines, has anybody seen the U.S. government sponsored ads promoting abstinence until marriage? I saw one the first time the other day, and got a little pissed. Here's the website:
http://www.4parents.gov/

SWP - "Why does the government even bother with the Catholic school system?"

An excellent question. Here in Ontario we are about to have a provincial election and the #1 issue is about "funding for faith-based schools". The incumbent liberals want to leave the status quo (full funding for Catholic and public school boards) while the conservative candidate is whining about the unfairness of this situation and wants to provide government funding for all religions who want their own schools. Beware the man who falls back on fairness as his only argument. He won't be happy until we all have equally abysmal education for our kids. Unfortunately nobody seems to be proposing to just put all the tax dollars into one 'quality', non-religious public system.

As Blondin noted, we have a constitutional anachronism in Ontario, which other provinces have managed to eliminate, but it did take considerable political courage (a substance in short supply at the best of times) in those other jurisdictions. I will note that it is only a few school boards so far, but that the promotion of the innoculations has been suspended until after our current provincial election.

That said, the sooner we drop the separate school funding, and add religious buildings to the property tax rolls, the better for everyone.

Yes, I was born catholic, but I got over it!

So these Catholics are arguing that yes, we'd like you to catch a disease if you engage in sexual activity before you get married?

What. A Bunch. Of Assholes.

So these Catholics are arguing that yes, we'd like you to catch a disease if you engage in sexual activity before you get married?

What. A Bunch. Of Assholes.

It could just be that the God Meme is really just a massive or gate whose output is stuck on a bunch of random, missfiring, legacy circuits which serve no useful purpose. Faith can just be a constant high input that's friggin' everything else up.

we'd like you to catch a disease if you engage in sexual activity before you get married

Worse than that, they're happy for them to catch it afterwards too! The important thing is that only the women get seriously punished, even if the man was actually the unfaithful one. That suits the patriarchal death cult(s) just fine because, to them, women are evil, sinful, temptresses of intrinsically lower worth than men. The man can be "punished" by the loss of his wife, keep all her property, make the requisite bogus apologies and donations to the relevant death cult and get himself another bride.

To these idiots, any plague that was good enough for God to use on any ancient people as described in scripture is good enough to use today! Victims must be guilty of some sin, right? Let them take their punishment, the pro-cancer forces argue.

heh, I was watching a comedy routine last night, where the comedian told a joke essentially saying the same thing:

"I'm a firm believer in God administering constant punishment for sin. In fact, just the other day, I walked up to a total stranger and punched him in the face. When he looked at me, I asked him: 'So what did you do to deserve that, eh?'"

When I was 4 years old, I was treated for genital warts. No one knows how I got them, though my Mom was sick at the thought that it might be the creepy older boy Wendell from down the street, who had earlier talked me into eating a highly poisonous, shiny red and black seed we called a rosary bead, which snack led to a stomach pumping in the ER. It may have been Wendell, though I have no memory of any abuse, and 36 years later I'm not at all curious to find out.

I worked in an OBGYN's office as a tech in college, and saw the women who came in with recurring genital warts, who had to go through repeated, humiliating and painful liquid nitrogen freezing of inner and outer genitalia before the warts were gone for good. I was lucky; once frozen off, the warts I had at 4 never came back.

But because of my exposure, I have to be especially careful, and make sure that whoever is screening my pap smear knows my history. Every time I change OBGYNs, I have to include HPV in my medical history, with the dubious explanation that I have no idea how I contracted the virus. But worst of all, I have to worry for the rest of my life about cervical cancer.

So the advent of the vaccine has been of special interest to me (though it's too late for me to benefit), but even I was shocked at the knee-jerk response from the fundies.

Though they acknowledge that HPV spread has reached epidemic proportions in the U.S., not only would they condemn the pre-maritally sexually active harlots among us, but also my four-year-old self, and all those virgin brides out there who have the misfortune to marry asymptomatic, but infected, grooms.

I was reading the comments to the Globe and Mail article linked earlier in the thread, and at first I was quite surprised by the quality of the comments.

The Glob and Snail, believe it or not, is a conservative (well, small "c"/Red Tory) newspaper. There seems to be a horde of National ComPost and USian trolls that make it their job to stink up the comments section. It got so bad that they no longer allow comments on any article involving Mahar Arar.

I occassionally mix it up with the alties in the science and technology section.

Oh, fer...

These eejits are my neighbours - Halton county is right next door, the next highway exit from mine off the 401. I knew I was moving closer to the wingnuttery when I moved from Vancouver to Onterrible, but this is much closer than I expected.

I answered a letter in my city's major paper from a girl at a (Catholic) secondary school, who objected to the vaccine (first dose) on the grounds that (a) it gave her pain in the arm, a tingling feeling and some feelings of faintness and (b) it was genetically engineered.

In my return letter, which was heavily cut by the newspaper, I tried to make the point (it didn't make the cut) that HPV threatens all women who have sex, and by definition everybody's mother has had sex. Well, okay, ONE has not if you believe the Bible, but everybody's mother living today certainly has had sex.

John Paul I was the one hope for the Church to see reason and move into something approaching a glimpse of reality. Now look at what we have had since - a Polish ex-resistance fighter, followed by a Germanic ex-Hitler Jungen. (rolls eyes)

I left the Church because the expected Second Renaissance looked like being derailed; I will not go back until, or unless, it gets back on the rails and moves forwards, and I will be doing everything in my power to immunize my young cousins against its lures. If not by making atheists of them (which I can't, because I don't wear the red A), then at least by encouraging them to be hard-nosed skeptics.

Is there something in those communion crackers that shorts out the logic circuits of the brain?

No, but there's some interesting stuff in the wine.

merk has shown that their vaccine is about equally effective in young adolescent boys and girls and more effective in either than in young adult women.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/24838.php

Canada has just finished approving a huge payout for aboriginal kids abused and injured by the church run Residential Schools in place earlier in the 20th century. I wonder if there will have to be a similar program for girls who are future cervical cancer victims who were (in effect) abused by the parents/schools/church failure to provide a proper and available level of care through this vaccination program?

Suppose for the sake of argument, that the HPV vaccine really did open the doors to wild, crazy sexual behaviour in young girls, and increased their likely hood of becoming sexually active younger (I know this is far from the case but bear with me).

If this was the case, it still is not an argument for wihtholding the vaccine. Cervical cancer is a terrible disease, and we should vaccinate as widely as possible.

To me it is a question of priorities. If the fundies assumptions above the vaccine are true (and I have strong reason to believe that they're not), then the choice is between:

a) Daughter having a much reduced chance of catching a terrible disease and being a skamp;
b) daughter being too scared of said disease to become a skamp, but is in actual fact, just as exposed to it.

I would much rather protect my daughter and place some trust in her than leave her without every possible protection from a terrible disease. I wonder why the fundies see differently?

The Toronto Catholic School Board has approved the vaccine program. So not all of the Catholic school boards are evil (at least on this issue).