On Healthy Living

Two stories on Good Morning America this morning really got me riled up. The first had to do with the vaccine for Human Papilloma Virus or HPV. HPV is a sexually transmitted disease that the vast majority of sexually active people contract at some point in their lives.

There are more than 100 varieties of the disease, about 5.5 million new cases a year, 20 million people in America have it, and about three out of four people aged 15 to 49 will contract it at some point in their lives.

It isn’t fatal for most people, and most people never know they have it. But in some cases, depending on the strain, it causes cervical cancer.

So you would think a vaccine for this virus would be wonderful news. About 14,000 women get cervical cancer each year and 5,000 die. This is a vaccine that will save lives.

The trouble is, it really needs to be given to girls before they are sexually active, and some think that this will give those girls a license to fornicate and that they’ll be given the mistaken impression that they are protected from all sexually transmitted diseases because of this one shot. Because girls are stupid, and all they want is sex. At age 10.

Anyway, that was bad enough, but then there was a story about a pill you can take to make your hair straight if it is curly or curly if it is straight. The pill is still in development, apparently, but the folks at L’Oreal think they can design hormones that will change the shape of the hair’s root bulb (I’m not making this up) to make your hair grow whichever way you prefer.

To which Diane Sawyer said something along the lines of Who researches this? And Robin Roberts said something about it making a lot of money.

Bingo. While L’Oreal admittedly is not a drug company, it’s part of a disturbing trend. Companies are much more interested in producing products, including drugs, that will help baby boomers with low self-esteem pretend they’re not getting any older. There’s more money in erectile disfunction than in producing the next new AIDS drug (or preventing cervical cancer, for that matter).

Both of these stories illustrate to me that this country and the medical/beauty/drug industries have their priorities all out of whack. We’d rather pretend children don’t have sex than give them a vaccine that could save their lives decades down the road. And instead of spending energy and money on social issues that really matter, companies direct funds to researching genetic mutation in the name of beauty (I can’t imagine what else those “hormones” might do to a body).

Makes a girl want to go live in a cave, I tell you.

To the source:
American Social Health Association
ABC News

Sarah White wrote this on November 18th, 2005 and filed it under Healthy Living, Women's Health, Health & Aging |