GOD'S GREAT PLAN

I think the religious right is proving once again that although they do not believe in evolution they still obey its laws. Look, bacteria may be a part of God’s great plan but we still require restaurant workers to wash their hands before leaving the restroom, not because “cleanliness is next to Godliness” but because it’s easier to stop hepatitis B with soap and water then with a catechism. And there are over 100 Human papilloma-viruses (HPV) that we know of, of which only about 30 are passed primarily through sexual contact and only about six of those can, eventually, develop into cancer. But it’s impossible to know when you have even been exposed to any of them because the viruses remain dormant for years, even decades. At worse there may be an outbreak of genital warts soon after exposure but not always and usually if warts do develop they clear up by themselves whether their specific virus can later cause cancer or not. But 99.7% of all those diagnosed with cervical cancer world wide have also been first infected with at least one of the six deadly HPVs.
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None of the HPVs want to give you cancer. It is not a choice that 8,000 base pairs of adenine – cytosine and guanine- thymine strung along a ladder of pentose sugar between some phosphate bonds are capable of making. But put these little buggers in a warm salty liquid (like a human cell) and they release a couple of proteins, labeled E6 and E7, which suppress the proteins the cell uses to control its growth and division. After that the HPV is steering the bus and the cell goes where the HPV tells it to go.
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All of this is a series of chemical reactions produced by an entity that doesn’t have a nucleus, let alone a brain, let alone a moral imperative. It’s not even alive, technically, until it infects you. Before that the HPVs are just a bundle of chemicals. But in 2004, almost 25,000 women in America were hospitalized with cervical cancer, at a total cost of $186 million; four thousand of those women die every year because of that bundle of chemicals. Worldwide over 230,000 women died last year - almost a 50% mortality rate - of an infection that can be prevented by three simple shots given over a six month period.
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According to the magazine “New Scientist” 80% of parents want their children inoculated against the HPVs. The Australian government has mandated the vaccine for all girls beginning at age 11. The American Food and Drug Administration has licensed the vaccine in America as safe. Two of the largest evangelical groups in America– Focus on the Family and The Family Research Council - have backed the vaccine - at least publicly. And the vaccine is 100% effective as long as it is administered before a woman is exposed to HPV. It is much less effective once she has become infected. According to the American Medical Journal only one in four women between the ages of 15 to 49 has not been infected with an HPV. Clearly, inoculating girls before puberty (9 to 11) would eventually save almost 10,000 lives a year.
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And yet: Bridget Maher, from The FRC, warned, “Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful because they may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex." And Sadie Fields from the Georgia Christian Alliance warned, “We think it sends the wrong signal to young girls.” And Dr. Reginald Finger, who sits on the President’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, has said the HPV vaccine undermines the administration’s “abstinence only” policy: “With any vaccine…distribution would certainly be a factor, and it is something we will have to pay attention to…”
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Send a signal? I thought we were trying to save lives. And where do you apply for premarital sex license, City Hall? And if the city charges a fee for that, does that make the city your pimp? What it seems to boil down to is that Evangelical Christian leaders have decided to quietly kill this advance in medicine even if it means murdering their own children to punish them for failing to just say no to sex.
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It becomes increasingly clear that the only way every American will be free to chart their own moral course is to vote for a Democrat in next year's presidential election, which is a silly proposal since all politicians are more alike than they are different, but the Praise Jesus crowd doesn’t seem willing to be reasonable. That makes the calculation simple: Survival of the Strongest. The handful of religious dunderheads will slowly be wiped out by cervical cancer while those humans who use their brains will survive and multiply and inherit the earth; i.e. God's plan.
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The HPV incubates in no living creature except humans. We could wipe out this scourge in a single generation. No more young mothers would ever have to say goodbye to their babies because of cervical cancer, ever again. There is only one problem: make the vaccine optional and the dunderhead kids will be infecting your kids till the end of time.

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