Whole Foods is selling dangerous anti-vaccine propaganda in its checkout aisles

Source: Insider Date: December 10th, 2019 Author: Maddie Stone   More than any other major grocery store, Whole Foods has made healthy living central to its brand. Based on the Amazon-owned supermarket's tremendous popularity, it's a strategy that has worked. If you look past the colorful organic produce displays and sustainably-sourced seafood counter, however, you'll start to notice incongruities. There's nothing particularly healthful, for instance, about the homeopathy aisle — a section of Whole Foods' Whole Body Department that sells 19th century pseudoscience masquerading as cold and flu remedies — or the shelves filled with supplements and probiotics making claims that often don't hold up to scientific scrutiny. But all of this pales in comparison to the disinformation Whole Foods is selling in its check-out aisle: magazines with articles promoting vaccine skepticism. Insider recently found several magazines that have run articles raising unfounded concerns about the safety or efficacy of vaccines. These messages are not only out of line with the mainstream medical consensus, they are actively dangerous, according to public health experts. Scattered amongst the breezy magazines devoted to healthy cooking and pet care are titles like Well Being Journal, a bi-monthly publication sold at Whole Foods stores in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia, among other locations. It has published articles that tout medically unsupported homeopathic therapies as "non-toxic" alternatives to vaccination. Others promote the debunked link between the MMR vaccine and autism. One particularly egregious article in a 2017 issue, adapted from a defunct anti-vaccine [...]

2019-12-12T12:09:36-07:00December, 2019|Oral Cancer News|

How Anti-Vaccine Sentiment Took Hold in the United States

Source: The New York Times Date: September 23, 2019 Author: Jan Hoffman As families face back-to-school medical requirements this month, the country feels the impact of a vaccine resistance movement decades in the making.   The question is often whispered, the questioners sheepish. But increasingly, parents at the Central Park playground where Dr. Elizabeth A. Comen takes her young children have been asking her: “Do you vaccinate your kids?” Dr. Comen, an oncologist who has treated patients for cancers related to the human papillomavirus that a vaccine can now prevent, replies emphatically: Absolutely. She never imagined she would be getting such queries. Yet these playground exchanges are reflective of the national conversation at the end of the second decade of the 21st century — a time of stunning scientific and medical advances but also a time when the United States may, next month, lose its World Health Organization designation as a country that has eliminated measles, because of outbreaks this year. The W.H.O. has listed vaccine hesitancy as one of the top threats to global health. As millions of families face back-to-school medical requirements and forms this month, the contentiousness surrounding vaccines is heating up again, with possibly even more fervor. Though the situation may seem improbable to some, anti-vaccine sentiment has been building for decades, a byproduct of an internet humming with rumor and misinformation; the backlash against Big Pharma; an infatuation with celebrities that gives special credence to the anti-immunization statements from actors like Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey and Alicia Silverstone, the rapper Kevin Gates and Robert F. [...]

2019-09-24T11:31:18-07:00September, 2019|Oral Cancer News|

Why HPV Vaccination Rates Remain Low in Rural States

Source: TechnologyReview.com Author: Emily Mullin Date: September 1, 2017   Mandi Price never thought she’d be diagnosed with cancer at age 24. She was a healthy college student finishing her senior year when, during a regular Pap smear, her gynecologist found abnormal cells in her cervix. It was stage II cervical cancer. Even more devastating was the fact that her cancer was preventable. Doctors detected a strain of human papillomavirus, the most common sexually transmitted infection in the U.S., in Price’s cancer cells. That strain of HPV is targeted by a vaccine called Gardasil. But Price never got the vaccine. Her primary care doctor didn’t recommend it when she was a teenager growing up in Washington state. Had she received it before becoming infected with HPV, she wouldn’t have gotten cancer. Price dropped out of her classes to get treatment. She needed surgery to remove the tumor from her cervix, then underwent chemotherapy and radiation to kill any remaining cancerous tissue. At her one-year follow-up appointment, doctors found that the cancer had spread. She endured chemotherapy for another six months. Now, at 29, Price is in remission and is working in Los Angeles. “Most of my 20s comprised being in a hospital. It was isolating,” she says. Merck’s Gardasil vaccine was considered a breakthrough when it was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in June 2006. It was the first vaccine to protect against several cancers. But more than a decade after the vaccine came out, vaccination rates [...]

2017-10-29T20:13:32-07:00September, 2017|Oral Cancer News|

The scary reason doctors say kids need HPV vaccinations

Source: www.washingtonpost.com Author: Sarah Vander Schaaff When actor Michael Douglas told a reporter that his throat cancer was caused by HPV contracted through oral sex, two themes emerged that had nothing to do with celebrity gossip. The first was incredulity — since when was oral sex related to throat cancer? Even the reporter thought he had misheard. The second was embarrassment. This was too much information, not only about sexual behavior but also about one’s partners. Douglas apologized, and maybe the world was not ready to hear the greater truth behind what he was suggesting. That was four years ago. Today, there is no doubt in the medical community that the increase in HPV-related cancers such as the one Douglas described — which he later explained was found at the base of his tongue — is caused by sexual practices, in his case cunnilingus. And there is an urgency to better treat and prevent what is becoming the one type of oral cancer whose numbers are climbing, especially among men in the prime of their lives who have decades to live with the consequences of their cancer treatment. The number of people diagnosed with HPV-related oropharyngeal cancer, tumors found in the middle of the pharynx or throat including the back of the tongue, soft palate, sides of throat and tonsils — is relatively small — about 12,638 men and 3,100 women in the United States each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But these numbers are [...]

Nova Scotia to include boys in HPV vaccination schedule

Source: www.theglobeandmail.com Author: Kelly Grant, Health Reporter Boys in Nova Scotia will begin receiving free vaccinations against the human papillomavirus next fall, a move that makes the Maritime province only the third in Canada to extend public funding of the cancer-thwarting shot to all children, regardless of gender. In the budget unveiled on Thursday, Nova Scotia’s Liberal government announced it would make the HPV vaccine available to Grade 7 boys as part of the regular school-based immunization program. The expansion is expected to cost $492,000 a year. Every province in Canada already covers the HPV vaccine for girls in an effort to prevent genital warts and cervical cancer, both of which can be caused by some strains of the virus, which is transmitted through sex and skin-to-skin contact. But in recent years, oncologists and major health organizations – including the Canadian Cancer Society and the National Advisory Committee on Immunization – have begun calling for HPV vaccinations for boys, too. Until this week, only Prince Edward Island and Alberta had heeded that call with a publicly funded program. HPV can lead to cancers of the penis, anus, oral cavity and throat in men, as well as genital and anal warts. “We have a vaccine. It can prevent cancers in men and women, so we want Canadians to be vaccinated against it, because we can actually prevent cancers from starting in the first place,” said Robert Nuttall, the assistant director of cancer control policy at the Canadian Cancer Society. Nova Scotia’s [...]

Teen HPV Rates Were Cut In Half After The Vaccine Went Public

Source ThinkProgress.orgBy Annie-Rose Strasser Published Jun 19, 2013 at 2:35 pm   Following the 2006 introduction of a vaccine against cancer-causing human papillomavirus, rates of HPV in teen girls have plummeted to nearly half, a new study found on Wednesday. The Journal of Infectious Diseases reports that HPV infection in girls ages 14 to 19 dropped from 11.5 percent for the years 2003-2006 to 5.1 percent for 2007-2010. Since HPV can lead to cervical cancer, the results also could herald a drop in cancer rates for girls in this age range, too. The study illustrates a great advancement in public health, but it also underlines the consequences for those huge numbers of women and girls who are still not getting their vaccinations; in 2011, only 35 percent of girls ages 13-17 received all three shots in the vaccination series, and only 30 percent of women ages 19-26 had received the vaccine. Fear-mongering and conspiracy theories over the side effects of the HPV vaccine are a major reason that inoculation rates are so low. While the Centers for Disease control have deemed the shots safe, and especially effective for young girls, 16 percent of parents report not letting their children get the shots for fear of side effects. In fact, incidents of cancer from HPV are rising in the U.S., and the CDC says rates of inoculation are “unacceptably low.” These dangerous theories are fueled by conservatives like Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), who campaigned on her insistence that HPV vaccines cause “mental [...]

2013-06-20T11:53:25-07:00June, 2013|Oral Cancer News|

Quadrivalent HPV vaccine may be effective in young men

Source: www.medscape.org Author: Laurie Barclay, MD; Charles P. Vega, MD Quadrivalent human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine may prevent infection with HPV types 6, 11, 16, and 18 and the development of related external genital lesions in young men 16 to 26 years old, according to the results of a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind trial reported in the February 3 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. "Infection with ...HPV and diseases caused by HPV are common in boys and men," write Anna R. Giuliano, PhD, from the Risk Assessment, Detection, and Intervention Program, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute in Tampa, Florida, and colleagues. "We report on the safety of a quadrivalent vaccine (active against HPV types 6, 11, 16, and 18) and on its efficacy in preventing the development of external genital lesions and anogenital HPV infection in boys and men." The study sample consisted of 4065 healthy boys and men, aged 16 to 26 years, enrolled from 18 countries. The primary efficacy goal was to demonstrate that use of the quadrivalent HPV vaccine was associated with a lower incidence of external genital lesions related to HPV-6, 11, 16, or 18. The investigators used a per-protocol population, in which participants received all 3 vaccinations and had tested negative for relevant HPV types at enrollment, and an intent-to-treat population, in which participants received vaccine or placebo, regardless of baseline HPV status. In the intent-to-treat population, there were 36 external genital lesions in the vaccine group and 89 in the [...]

2011-02-15T13:47:01-07:00February, 2011|Oral Cancer News|

Why parents fear the needle

Source: nytimes.com Author: Michael Willrich Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, roughly one in five Americans believes that vaccines cause autism — a disturbing fact that will probably hold true even after the publication this month, in a British medical journal, of a report thoroughly debunking the 1998 paper that began the vaccine-autism scare. That’s because the public’s underlying fear of vaccines goes much deeper than a single paper. Until officials realize that, and learn how to counter such deep-seated concerns, the paranoia — and the public-health risk it poses — will remain. The evidence against the original article and its author, a British medical researcher named Andrew Wakefield, is damning. Among other things, he is said to have received payment for his research from a lawyer involved in a suit against a vaccine manufacturer; in response, Britain’s General Medical Council struck him from the medical register last May. As the journal’s editor put it, the assertion that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine caused autism “was based not on bad science but on a deliberate fraud.” But public fear of vaccines did not originate with Dr. Wakefield’s paper. Rather, his claims tapped into a reservoir of doubt and resentment toward this life-saving, but never risk-free, technology. Vaccines have had to fight against public skepticism from the beginning. In 1802, after Edward Jenner published his first results claiming that scratching cowpox pus into the arms of healthy children could protect them against smallpox, a political cartoon appeared showing newly vaccinated people with hooves [...]

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