One of my more heated posts had a trigger which I was too busy ranting to mention. That trigger was my attendance of a Science in the News seminar about contagious cancers. Which is how I got to my being upset at the resistance to the HPV vaccine.
All my ranting aside, SITN is a neat organization. It is a student organized, student run group devoted to educating the public about current issues in science, to showing the community how the science blurbs in the news may relate to them. I have been involved (lightly) with SITN for a couple of years. I was too chicken to volunteer to give a talk – something about having to be an authority on a particular subject makes me uneasy. I don’t deal well with authority, you could say. My own authority, that is. Instead, I contributed a couple of review articles that were sent out as an e-newsletter (SITN NewsFlash) to the subscribers to the SITN listserv.
The group presents regular talks at the Mattapan community center and on the Harvard campus. This season’s lectures ranged from global warming to autism and nanotechnology. The seminar on contagious cancers drew 50-70 attendees, most from the local community. They were active and vocal participants in the discussion, asking some really tough, insightful questions. It was nice to be reminded that what we do every day actually matters. Well, maybe not what I do, but what others work on does trickle down to the news, it does affect the community, it does make a difference, little by little.
The PowerPoint slides of all the lectures as well as podcasts of the lectures are available on the SITN site.
I’ve read some more-logical objections to the HPV vaccine such as that is only works for up to five years, only protects you from two strains of the virus, the cervical cancer only accounts for small proportion of cancer cases in women and survival rate is quite high anyway, the company is in debth so they’re spending 2 dollars on marketing for each dollar spend on research for this vaccine…(source article)
I don’t know if these objections are true but I guess if one is to object they are more valid (if true) then, in my opinion, silly oppositions claiming it will promote promiscuity. In fact, recent research from Oxford suggests abstinence only sexual education programmes don’t work anyway, and yet the US government is spending loads of money on it and Church in other countries, e.g. Croatia is pushing for such programmes, although evidently wrong, to be introduced as part of the national curriculum… This is science vs religion confilct isn’t it?!