Adding to our collection of posts about Gardasil and the HPV vaccine is the news that HPV is one of two viral links to lung cancer. Two new studies suggest that viruses - specifically, HPV and measles - can significantly boost a smoker's already serious risk of developing non-small cell lung cancer. Almost 90% of the over 200,000 cases of lung cancer that will be diagnosed in the United States this year are typed non-small cell lung cancer, and it tends to be a highly malignant version of cancer to end up with.

Both findings were presented Friday by separate research teams attending the European Lung Cancer Conference in Geneva.

"In terms of HPV, our finding is pretty controversial," said study author Dr. Arash Rezazadeh, a fellow of medical oncology and hematology at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. "And this is just the beginning of the road. There is much more work to be done. But it's important to know that being infected with this virus does appear to increase lung cancer risk."

As for the role of measles, the second study's lead author, Dr. Samuel Ariad, from the department of oncology at Soroka Medical Center in Beer Sheva, Israel, said that infection -- perhaps even asymptomatic infection -- seems to be associated with half of the lung cancer cases he tracked.

So,... can we mandate HPV vaccinations for all, now?

(Yes, I admit it would be good to see more studies done on this, in larger numbers, and with smokers as well as ill non-smokers. But I watched someone die from non-small cell lung cancer last year, and it's not something I'd wish on anyone - if we can stop even a small handful of those cases, along with all the other types of cancer HPV has been indicated in causing, isn't it worth the unlikely chance that the vaccine itself would encourage promiscuity?)
-Kelly Hills

Governor Spitzer--in this Blog?

While the current political trials of Governor Spitzer may at first appear to have no place in this Blog, a small item in the news, which is being discussed in the Feminist Law Professors Blog, caught my eye as well. Apparantly one of things caught on tape is a conversation with the woman, "Kristen", who met with Client 9--allegedly Gov. Spitzer. The New York Times reports that "After her encounter with Client 9, the prostitute told the booker for the agency that it had gone well, and the booker told her that he, in an apparent reference to Client 9, sometimes asked the women “to do things that, like, you might not think were safe.” (Link here)


While this could mean many things, it most likely means he didn't want to wear a condom. As a result, he exposed Kristen, and any other women he slept with, to the full range of STI's (including HIV and HPV) as well as unwanted pregnancy. In an interesting example of perhaps unintended coordination, another story on the NY Times' front page reports a study that 25% of U.S. teenagers (including 50% of African American teenagers) test positive for sex infections which is leading to the conclusion that treatment of boys (including vaccination against HPV) and men must be part of an effective public health strategy.

I do not believe that prostitution should be legalized. However, if there are situations where it is a transaction between consenting adults, and therefore ethically unobjectionable, there is no information here that indicates this is one of those situations. First, we only assume that Kristen is a U.S. citizen who can voluntarily leave this line of work. This is often untrue of sex workers in the U.S. There are increasing reports of foreign women lured to this country with the promise of jobs and then finding themselves forced to be sex workers. Moreover, the link between prostitution and drug addiction has been shown again and again. Is this a sound foundation for informed consent?

Moreover, whether or not it would ever be ethical to allow a sex worker to consent to exposure to an STI could there ever be informed consent by the spouse, or other partners, of a man who engages in this high risk behavior without her knowledge? (and all arguments hold the same however you would like to shuffle around the genders of the parties involved--there is quite a bit of male prostitution and it carries with it the same stigma of STI's and drug addiction).

Prostitution is a health risk for everyone, especially women, and just as we have ethical limits on the risks any individual can take, whether in the context of a drug trial or a risky surgery, we must consider them when the danger is not just to an individual woman who may or may not have consented but to all women who sleep with people who sleep with sex workers.
So is there a link between Governor Spitzer and women's bioethics? Absolutely there is and to the best of our knowledge, her name is Kristen.

Embracing the HPV Vaccine -- Warts and All?

We've posted before here and here about the HPV vaccine and debated whether or not it should be 'mandated' for girls; today in the NY Times an article in the Fashion and Style section (??) asks whether or not the parents would encourage their boys to get the vaccine. Currently, Gardasil is only FDA approved for girls and is marketed as preventing cervical cancer; but boys could benefit too, because the vaccine also protects against genital warts. Currently the vaccine is already approved for boys in Australia, Mexico and countries in the European Union; Merck will seek FDA approval for boys later this year. The question is, will the parents of young boys and girls in the USA buy it? Full article accessible here.

Should The HPV Vaccine Be Mandated?

We've discussed the HPV vaccine and why we think it should (or should not) be a mandatory vaccination - for both women and men (an argument we were making long before last week's study showed definitive proof of the need to vaccinate men). And on Tuesday night, when most of us were eying the results of Super Tuesday, our own Linda MacDonald Glenn was on a panel discussion hosted by Vanderbilt, on the same debate.

The video was streamed live, but for those of you who missed it, Vanderbilt should have the archived film up some time this week. The panel format makes it especially useful for people in teaching situations, who'd like to show their students a range of opinions in a civil debate.
-Kelly