Naba

A 29-year-old girlfriend (who is single and dating) who has been in to the doctor's for a check-up told me the following story.

"I wanted to know about this HPV vaccination business. The doctor really pushed that I get it, so he gives me a prescription and only THEN do I find out it's a $400 procedure. As if I have that kind of money laying around. Then I went to another (female) doctor and she basically shrugged her shoulders and said, 'Sure. You could get it if you wanted to'."

Another friend we were with told her the vaccination hasn't even truly proven to be effective. I thought I'd check that out. HPV is basically a virus that infect mucus membranes. There are different types, some of which are transmitted sexually. Most cases of cervical cancer are caused by HPV.

Enter the vaccine. In the US and Canada there are state- and province-wide calls for vaccination, because, ostensibly, governments want to prevent women from getting cervical cancer.

But according to studies done by doctors Jane Kim and Sue Goldie, which were published in the New England Journal of Medicine, there is no conclusive evidence that being vaccinated for HPV will have long-term beneficial effects - especially if you're older than 21.

Reading the doctors' study might be a bit confusing, but Dr. Charlotte J. Haug, editor-in-chief of The Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association, summarizes it well with the following:

"Despite great expectations and promising results of clinical trials, we still lack sufficient evidence of an effective vaccine against cervical cancer...By the summer of 2007, there were definitely promising results with regard to the effectiveness of the HPV vaccine in the prevention of precancerous lesions...However, serious questions regarding the overall effectiveness of the vaccine in the protection against cervical cancer remained to be answered, and more long-term studies were called for before large-scale vaccination programs could be recommended. Unfortunately, no longer-term results from such studies have been published since then."

So it seems governments may be administering vaccines that are either unnecessary, not worth it or even harmful. In the meantime, women and their daughters are giving governments money in trepidation - for shots of "maybe".