• 5/8/2007
  • Palm Beach, FL
  • Elisa Cramer
  • PalmBeachPost.com

After a 42-year-old African-American seamstress refused to give up her bus seat in 1955 to a white man, the nation responded to racism in Montgomery, Ala., in a way it had not nine months before, when a 15-year-old girl was arrested for doing the same thing.

Both women were bold. Both were courageous. Both were, as Rosa Parks described herself, “only tired … of giving in.” Neither deserved the arrest, but only one became the face of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It was not Claudette Colvin, a pregnant, unmarried teenager.

To make Florida’s lawmakers care about saving women from cervical cancer, a 58-year-old married father from Tampa – not sexually active teenagers – must become the face of the virus that leads to 3,700 deaths each year. David Hastings is fighting throat cancer that researchers say was caused by the same sexually transmitted virus that causes most cervical cancers.

“All of my adult life,” Mr. Hastings said to members of the House Schools and Learning Council last month, “I was a nonsmoker. I was a casual drinker. I was an exercise nut, a health nut.” Last spring, Mr. Hastings noticed two lumps in his neck while shaving. After five doctors and several scans, an ear, nose and throat specialist told him he had Stage 4 cancer. As Mr. Hastings pointed out, “There is no Stage 5.”

Mr. Hastings fainted at the doctor’s recommendation: “a radical neck dissection” to his collarbone to remove 26 lymph nodes, neck muscles, a jugular vein; followed by radiation and chemotherapy that would cave in his neck, numb him from ear to shoulder, harden his skin and offer a 60 percent chance of surviving for five years.

After turning to the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute in Tampa and Johns Hopkins University, Mr. Hastings had chemotherapy and radiation instead of surgery. “My throat was sunburned so much that the inside of my mouth was like an open boil.” He urged the council “on behalf of men who have HPV virus” that prevention is “way better than a cure.”

Ignoring medical evidence of the safety and need for widespread use of a new vaccine that prevents the cancer-causing strains of the human papillomavirus, the council voted down House Bill 561, which would have required girls in Florida to be vaccinated against cervical cancer before starting sixth grade.

I understand the distaste for Merck & Co.’s self-serving, state-by-state political lobbying to get its vaccine approved – not coincidentally before a competitor receives federal approval to sell a similar vaccine. But the bill would have saved GlaxoSmithKline a space in the market. And better that a drugmaker monopolize a vaccine than the virus continue its vile monopoly on potentially fatal cervical cancer. In this case, good public-health policy also would be profitable for a drug company.

But Rep. Trey Traviesa, R-Tampa, promoted the lie that parents would somehow lose authority to decide when and how “to have a discussion about a sexually transmitted disease with their children.”

Rep. Ed Homan, R-Tampa, an orthopedic surgeon, pointed out that his bill gave parents the right to refuse the vaccine with a mere signature. “I like the words ‘parental choice,”” Rep. Homan said, “That is, I want my child to be protected from cervical cancer, or I don’t.”

History could have predicted that ideology and gender bias would trump science in the HPV vaccine debate. A federal law that took effect in 1993 has been slow to force more medical research on women, and disparities continue in insurance policies that kick women out of hospitals too soon after mastectomies and gynecological surgeries, or that cover Viagra and prostate cancer screenings but not birth-control pills and mammograms.

According to the St. Petersburg Times, a Moffitt Cancer Center study of 3,000 men worldwide shows a male HPV infection rate double that of women. If lawmakers won’t do all they can to prevent 3,700 American women from dying of cervical cancer each year, maybe they’ll help save the 10,000 American men infected each year by the same cancer-causing virus.