The Lilting House Archive

A Word About Gardasil

Many thanks to the readers who have written me regarding the Gardasil ad that has been appearing in my sidebar here. I hadn't seen it myself until this morning; different ads appear each time you reload the page.

Here at ClubMom, I don't have any control over the ads that appear on my blog. I did write the ClubMom folks expressing my concerns about the Gardasil ad, but they let me know that they have no plans to pull it.

Why am I concerned about this particular ad? Protecting women from cervical cancer seems a worthy cause, doesn't it—and one you would expect me to be particularly in favor of, with a daughter who is a cancer survivor? (In her case, leukemia.)

The Gardasil media blitz omits some important information. The vaccine, which is touted as protection against HPV, a virus linked to cervical cancer, actually only protects against 4 out of the 90 strains of HPV—and only for five years.

Lilting House reader Christine reports:

This vaccine has been linked to deaths, due to blood clots, in girls.  It is also the vaccine that Merck has been trying to have states mandate for girls ages 9 and up.

That bears repeating. HPV is a sexually transmitted disease, but its manufacturer is trying to have states mandate it for girls as young as nine years old.

Here's what the American Academy of Pediatrics has to say about that:

Dr. Joseph Bocchini, chairman of the committee on infectious disease of the American Academy of Pediatrics, says HPV can take up to 20 years to cause cervical cancer. His organization has withheld endorsement from Gardasil and one of the reasons is that the 20-year incubation period indicates that the vaccine, which has a 5-year effectiveness span, would offer no protection in the overwhelming majority of cervical cancer cases in the United States.

In fact, the American Cancer Society reports that from 2000 to 2003, more than 70 percent of the cervical cancer patients in America were older than 40 – well outside Gardasil’s protection window.

So if the incubation period is 20 years, and the life span of the vaccine is five years, how many booster shots would have to be obtained by the female who is inoculated? Each of the doses of the vaccine runs $360 and it is feasible that a female could have to get at least 10 boosters for a total of $3,600. As one reporter wrote, this means big bucks for Merck.

(The quote is from this article at American Life League.)

I'm sorry the ad is continuing to appear here, and I strongly urge all parents to examine the facts about this vaccine.

Why the Internet Was Created

So that people like William Kamkwamba could inspire the entire rest of the world.

This is awesome both in the "too totally cool" sense of the word I absorbed into my pores as a teenager in the 80s and in the old, non-slang sense of inspiring awe. William is a 19-year-old in Malawi, and this is his windmill blog. He grew up in a village with no electricity, in a house lit by pungent paraffin candles. He had to drop out of school for five years because his family couldn't pay the fees. But just because William couldn't take classes didn't mean he stopped learning:

During that time I decided to try to get as much education as possible by reading as many books as I could find. An organization called the Malawian Teacher Training Activity (MTTA), a project of USAID contributed a large quantity of books to the primary school library near my home. I read many of them.  One of the books I read was called Using Energy, a primary school textbook about how energy is made. Inside the book there were plans for a windmill. I decided to build a windmill to provide power for my family.

Read the rest to find out what happened—and how it came to pass that William is now writing a blog.

PaperBack Swap Says "Stop the Fires"

The Missouri bookburning has become even more of a dog-and-pony show. Now the good folks at PaperBack Swap have gotten involved, mounting an effort to douse the fires:

Of course we were unhappy at the thought of all those books being burned! So we contacted Tom to see if he would consider donating them to our PBS [Note: that's Paperback Swap, not Public Broadcasting Service] family. He said that he has had several contacts from different groups asking for his books so that they don't get burned and has vowed to select one of the groups to receive them--he hasn't decided yet which one. Of course, we think that he should give all of them to PBS!

To show Club support for the idea, we have started a petition from our members asking Tom to let PBS find new readers and new homes for these books, instead of destroying them.

Here is the proposed plan:

Robert and/or Richard fly to Kansas City and rent a big truck. Then we drive it back, heading towards PBS headquarters in Atlanta, with numerous stops along the way. At each city we visit, we would invite our members to come meet us and take as many books as you want. All for FREE!

It'll be interesting to see Tom Wayne's response to this. Is his primary objective to inspire people to read more books, to boost sales, or to garner media attention? And I wonder what other organizations will jump into the ring?

Burning Books to Make a Point

A bookstore owner in Missouri is burning his book collection to "protest what he sees as society's diminishing support for the printed word."

"This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today," Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books.

Strikes me as a little like cutting off your nose to spite your face, but I suppose I see his point.

Kansas City has seen the number of used bookstores decline in recent years and there are few independent bookstores left in town, said Will Leathem, a co-owner of Prospero's Books.

"There are segments of this city where you go to an estate sale and find five TVs and three books," Leathem said.

Dozens of customers took advantage of the Sunday's book-burning, searching through those waiting to go into the fire for last-minute bargains.

Mike Bechtel paid $10 for a stack of books, including an antique collection of children's literature, which he said he'd save for his 4-year-old son.

"I think given the fact it is a protest of people not reading books, it's the best way to do it," Bechtel said. "(Wayne has) made the point that not reading a book is as good as burning it."

Ah, so it's not just a protest, it's a fire sale.

Do you think Tom Wayne's bookburning will make people think about how much (or little) time they spend reading actual books? Will any passersby be moved to go home and curl up with a classic instead of reaching for the remote control? Or will they all be looking to see if they made the evening news?

The WSJ Has Left Me Speechless—Almost

From The Wall Street Journal Online:

The rise of digital entertainment has upended whole industries, from Hollywood to the music business. Now it's striking at a touchstone of the American family: the allowance. Kids are pouring money into things that can't be bought with cash -- music downloads, cellphone ringtones and online videogames. JupiterResearch estimates teenagers spent $3 billion online last year alone. In many families, the upshot has been the demise of the weekly cash dole that parents have long used to teach kids financial responsibility and keep them from busting the budget.

Instead, "giving the kids their allowance" now often entails untangling a complex web of electronic transactions. It means figuring out which sibling blew $29.99 to download Season 4 of "South Park" on iTunes and getting someone to fess up for charging those Jay-Z ringtones to mom's cellphone bill. Some parents find themselves taking on the role of bill collector and dunning their kids for reimbursement, while others are throwing up their hands and giving up on spending limits altogether.

Okay, this paints a picture of a world so different from mine that I hardly know where to begin. I don't have teenagers (yet), and I don't have kids who are into ringtones or have any clue what South Park is. The only person in this family who has paid money to download a ringtone is, ahem, the mother. (A Green Day song to ring when Scott calls me, if you're curious.)

But come on. Come on! Really? Kids are racking up e-bills and parents feel helpless to stop them? These kids are getting credit card numbers from somewhere. Surely their parents possess enough wit to figure out how to keep the cash card numbers out of their children's keyboarding fingers.