One little prick could save the lives of thousands of women

NO, not Stephen “Birdshit” Green. He’s DEAD AGAINST the cervical cancer vaccine for teenage girls. But, while he may be an odious, puffed up prude with an aggravated god complex, he certainly has a talent for inspiring genius journalism.

Like this, from Carol Midgley in The Times yesterday.

Had the flu jab this year? And if so, may I ask whether it has given you a reckless urge to go around inhaling other people’s saliva? Surely now that you’re immune from those viruses skulking on surfaces and in bodily fluids, you’ll want to lick public hand-rails just for the hell of it? Or hurl yourself into the path of a tramp’s wet sneeze? No? Thought not. And yet there are people who think that if we give teenage girls the new cervical cancer vaccine, it will turn them into wanton nymphomaniacs.

And one of those people – ta-ra – is:

Stephen Green, of the lobby group Christian Voice, [who] has said of the ground-breaking Cervarix jab: ‘Anyone giving this drug to a girl is telling her: “I think you are a slag”‘.

Midgley also takes a swipe at the Islamic Medical Association, headed by another religious imbecile, Dr Abdul Majid Katme. The IMA said that it will make girls think it’s OK to “pick up… boys and sleep around”.

“If we were looking for champions of skewed logic, I think we’ve just found them”, she said, then drew attention to a Roman Catholic school in Prestwich which recently refused to allow the vaccination on its premises because “we do not believe that school is the right place for the three injections to be administered”.

Some parents refuse to let their daughters have it on moral grounds, claiming that it sends out the ‘wrong message’. Tell that to Jade Goody, 28, who this week began chemotherapy for advanced cervical cancer that was missed by routine screening and now has a 50/50 chance of survival.

This week the vaccine, being offered to 12 and 13-year-old girls in UK schools, is headline news again, and not in a good way. Debbie Jones, from Orkney, is furious that, although she and her husband refused permission for their 13-year-old daughter to have the injection (because she is diabetic they worried about side-effects), it was shoved in her arm anyway, allegedly against her will. Now an NHS inquiry is under way and members of the public are bombarding the father’s blog, urging him to report it to the police as a physical assault on his child.

But to deny your daughter this vaccine without a sound medical reason is tantamount to child neglect. You don’t have to be promiscuous to become infected with the human papilloma virus (HPV), which causes most cervical cancer: just one sexual partner will do.

An under-reported story from the Department of Health this year revealed that, thanks to the immunisation programme, meningitis C has been all but wiped out in this country. For the first time since records began, there were no deaths last year from the C-strain of meningococcus among under-19s. Yet I don’t remember many street parties celebrating this news.

Are we thankful enough for such advances? I don’t think so. We take them for granted, regarding immunisation programmes as at best a necessary chore and at worst a State attempt to poison our kids. Too many parents now see inoculations as something they can opt out of, knowing that their offspring will benefit from other people’s children having had them. We have forgotten the terror of rampant, incurable illness: maybe we should bring back the bubonic plague to refresh our memories.

Imagine if schools from the 1950s onwards had followed the example of St Monica’s High School in Prestwich and banned the polio sugar lump? Or the TB jab – because a school was an “inappropriate venue” to administer it.

You don’t have the rabies vaccine then try to get bitten by a rabid dog, just as you won’t have a dose of Cervarix and turn into a sex maniac. Those girls who would have said no to sex in the first place will still say no, and those who would have said yes will still go ahead and do the deed. The only difference is that it’s less likely to kill them.

Researchers say that if all 12-year-old girls in the UK were vaccinated with GlaxoSmithKline’s Cervarix jab, the annual number of cases of the disease would drop from 2,841 to 682.