According to the CDC this blog will give your kid gas

As a new parent the number one concern of mine is the health of my daughter. When looking up information about the health and welfare of children one can and will be bombarded with all kinds of misinformation. No better example of this is the nonsense surrounding the supposed dangers of vaccines.

Since Dr Andrew Wakefield's discredited study, and the promotion of such fraudulent findings by the likes of Jenny McCarthy, parents have been misinformed about the side effects of vaccines from autism to ring around the collar. Parents often associate changes in their child when they've had a vaccine, from the flu to some neurological disorder. Now if we lived in a world where causation does prove correlation, they would have a point, but we don't, and their point is misguided at best. Does reading this blog make you sexy? I'd like to think so, but sadly genetics play more of a role in that than The Wilson Family. The fact that only sexy people read this blog doesn't prove anything.

The fact of the matter is is that vaccines have been instrumental in eliminating horrible diseases, such as polio and small pox. The anti-vaccine folks deny this with the zeal of a religious fundamentalist, and there's really no arguing with them as they don't care about things like facts. They want to believe that big Pharma is out to kill your children, and they can white knight their kids as only they think they can. It makes them feel important, and a better parent, if they have an evil to fight against, real or imagined.

If you read the intellectually vapid articles from homeopaths, naturopaths, and other quack websites, you'll be called a fool, or worse, for wanting to protect your children from debilitating diseases in the only way science knows for sure how. New on the list of anti-vaccine folk is the HPV vaccine.

A friend of mine posted an article by Catherine Stack on Facebook (which seems to be the biggest outlet for the advancement of quackery), in which she denounces the HPV vaccine. Let's analyze the nosense shall we?

First she claims that the Gardasil vaccine, which is designed to protect those from HPV, is only designed to protect against four strands of HPV. Why that's important I don't know, nor care. Then she goes on to make an interesting point that getting regular pap smears can help fight against HPV, which I can't argue with. Then she hops aboard the crazy train:

Now, lets look at the high percent of injected young girls who have had serious and even life-threatening side effects from the Gardisil vaccine. According to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (medalerts.org), as of January 2010, there were more that 17,000 reports of adverse reactions to this vaccine and 59 deaths and 18 of these deaths were girls under 17. When you compare these numbers to women who are not vaccinated, it is absolutely safer to do nothing — just get your Pap smears!

First off, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, VAERS, is co-sponsered by the FDA and CDC, which naturopaths, such as Ms. Stack, see as the evil empire. To use the data of the enemy to back her claim is dripping with dramatic irony, but it gets even weirder. A simple search of VAERS finds that it's only a public reporting system and nothing else. That means if I think my child got a case of the farts from a vaccine, I report it to VAERS and they would publish my own unscientific findings. Hardly the stuff of hard science, and even VAERS admits it. A simple reading of VAERS FAQs will tell you that in no way should the data indicate that serious complications from vaccines exist until further study is complete.

So the VAERS system is in no way an accurate record of the side effects of vaccines, but Ms. Stack oddly goes to treat it as such. She states that 59 deaths have been caused by Gardasil, but looking closer at the data reported to VAERS, none of the deaths (actually 71 reported in this case) demonstrated any link to any vaccine. In face, only 34 of these reported deaths could be confirmed at all, and of those 34 there was no indication that the death was caused by Gardasil, and some even indicated that their demise was from another cause.

Ms. Stack goes on to fraudulently use that data to indicate girls get neurological disorders from Gardasil, which yes, some people have reported this to VAERS, but again no evidence backs this claim up. Even with the reports given, there rates of Guillain-Barré Syndrome is no higher among vaccinated people than unvaccinated.

Now if you're an anti-vaccine person, or someone who likes to believe big pharma is out to poison your dog food, you'll probably say something like "oh you just believe everything the FDA tells you." This is something I've heard many times and every time it's an unfair characterization. I believe in analyzing evidence to making important decisions about my child's health. If the evidence is backs up what the FDA, or anyone for that matter, claims, I'll believe it, if it's not, it can and should be easily dismissed. In the case of Ms. Stack, one can safely assume she's misrepresenting data to further her anti-vaccine cause. Whether she did it out of incompetence or if it was deliberate remains to be seen. I'd like to think she's just uneducated rather than someone who willingly puts out misinformation that puts others at risk, but I like to look on the bright side of things.

Now is Gardasil safe? According to the authorities on the matter we have no reason to believe otherwise, but I think some will want Gardasil to be unsafe, so they can gallop on their high horses fighting a fight that's unnecessary and can cause the uneducated to risk harm to their children.

I'll let Ms Stack have the last word, which should be telling:

"Cancer and many other diseases are not established in your body from lack of a pill or vaccine. How you eat, live and think makes you either an open door to disease or an unlikely candidate." - Catherine Stack