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Cover image of Three Shots at Prevention
Cover image of Three Shots at Prevention
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Three Shots at Prevention

The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine's Simple Solutions

edited by Keith Wailoo, Julie Livingston, Steven Epstein, and Robert Aronowitz

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In 2007, Texas governor Rick Perry issued an executive order requiring that all females entering sixth grade be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus (HPV), igniting national debate that echoed arguments heard across the globe over public policy, sexual health, and the politics of vaccination. Three Shots at Prevention explores the contentious disputes surrounding the controversial vaccine intended to protect against HPV, the most common sexually transmitted infection.

When the HPV vaccine first came to the market in 2006, religious conservatives decried the government's approval of the...

In 2007, Texas governor Rick Perry issued an executive order requiring that all females entering sixth grade be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus (HPV), igniting national debate that echoed arguments heard across the globe over public policy, sexual health, and the politics of vaccination. Three Shots at Prevention explores the contentious disputes surrounding the controversial vaccine intended to protect against HPV, the most common sexually transmitted infection.

When the HPV vaccine first came to the market in 2006, religious conservatives decried the government's approval of the vaccine as implicitly sanctioning teen sex and encouraging promiscuity while advocates applauded its potential to prevent 4,000 cervical cancer deaths in the United States each year. Families worried that laws requiring vaccination reached too far into their private lives. Public health officials wrestled with concerns over whether the drug was too new to be required and whether opposition to it could endanger support for other, widely accepted vaccinations. Many people questioned the aggressive marketing campaigns of the vaccine's creator, Merck & Co. And, since HPV causes cancers of the cervix, vulva, vagina, penis, and anus, why was the vaccine recommended only for females? What did this reveal about gender and sexual politics in the United States? With hundreds of thousands of HPV-related cancer deaths worldwide, how did similar national debates in Europe and the developing world shape the global possibilities of cancer prevention?

This volume provides insight into the deep moral, ethical, and scientific questions that must be addressed when sexual and social politics confront public health initiatives in the United States and around the world.

Reviews

Reviews

Well written and well researched. It is a valuable addition to the fields of public health, public policy, and pharmaceutical marketing.

It deserves wide readership, particularly for graduate student seminars in public health, medical social science and history of science and medicine.

An eminently readable examination of the turbulence surrounding this particular collision of science, commerce, and politics.

Masterfully insightful and astute... This is a vital new text for undergraduate and graduate pedagogical programs focusing on the history and social-scientific analysis of health, medicine, science, technology, and society as well as a significant resource for debate within the policymaking arena and for instruction in public health and cancer prevention.

Scholars and policymakers alike will draw lasting lessons from this timely, fascinating, and engaging collection on the controversial HPV vaccine.

About

Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
352
ISBN
9780801896729
Illustration Description
9 halftones
Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction. A Cancer Vaccine for Girls? HPV, Sexuality, and the New Politics of Prevention
Vaccine Time Lines
Part I: The Known and the Unknown: Vaccination Decisions amid Risk and

Acknowledgments
Introduction. A Cancer Vaccine for Girls? HPV, Sexuality, and the New Politics of Prevention
Vaccine Time Lines
Part I: The Known and the Unknown: Vaccination Decisions amid Risk and Uncertainty
Chapter 1. The Coercive Hand, the Benefi cent Hand: What the History of Compulsory Vaccination Can Tell Us about HPV Vaccine Mandates
Chapter 2. Gardasil: A Vaccine against Cancer and a Drug to Reduce Risk
Chapter 3. HPV Vaccination Campaigns: Masking Uncertainty, Erasing Complexity
Chapter 4. The Great Undiscussable: Anal Cancer, HPV, and Gay Men's Health
Chapter 5. Cervical Cancer, HIV, and the HPV Vaccine in Botswana
Part II: Girls at the Center of the Storm: Marketing and Managing Gendered Risk
Chapter 6. Safeguarding Girls: Morality, Risk, and Activism
Chapter 7. Producing and Protecting Risky Girlhoods
Chapter 8. Re- Presenting Choice: Tune in HPV
Part III: Focus on the Family: Parents Assessing Morality, Risk, and Opting Out
Chapter 9. Parenting and Prevention: Views of HPV Vaccines among Parents Challenging Childhood Immunizations
Chapter 10. Decision Psychology and the HPV Vaccine
Chapter 11. Nonmedical Exemptions to Mandatory Vaccination: Personal Belief, Public Policy, and the Ethics of Refusal
Chapter 12. Sex, Science, and the Politics of Biomedicine: Gardasil in Comparative Perspective
Part IV: In Search of Good Government: Eu rope, Africa, and America at the Crossroads of Cancer Prevention
Chapter 13. Vaccination as Governance: HPV Skepticism in the United States and Africa, and the North- South Divide
Chapter 14. Public Discourses and Policymaking: The HPV Vaccination from the Europe an Perspective
Chapter 15. HPV Vaccination in Context: A View from France
Notes on Contributors
Index

Author Bios
Keith Wailoo
Featured Contributor

Keith Wailoo

Keith Wailoo is the Townsend Martin Professor of History and Public Affairs and Vice Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is the author of Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease Identity in Twentieth-Century America, Pain: A Political History, and Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health.
Julie Livingston
Featured Contributor

Julie Livingston

Julie Livingston is an associate professor of history at Rutgers, the author of Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana, and coeditor, along with Keith Wailoo and Peter Guarnaccia, of A Death Retold: Jesica Santillan, the Bungled Transplant, and Paradoxes of Medical Citizenship.
Featured Contributor

Steven Epstein

Steven Epstein is the John C. Shaffer Professor in Humanities, a professor of sociology, and a faculty affiliate in the Gender Studies Program and Science in Human Culture Program at Northwestern University. He has written several award-winning books, among them Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research and Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge.
Featured Contributor

Robert Aronowitz

Robert Aronowitz is a professor in the Department of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Unnatural History: Breast Cancer and American Society and Making Sense of Illness: Science, Society, and Disease.
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