Don't upvote this, bury it! Shhhhhhhhhhh

I'll pass this info on to everyone I know!

I will start counter rumors about it's ability to whiten teeth and cure the common cold.

Then all men should take advantage of these benefits too! tee hee :D

My teeth are white as the driven snow, and I could lick the sink in a preschool and not get sick. :P

So far as the article goes...it looks as though Merck needs some other population to push Gardasil on. Conservatives have really gotten their hackles up against mandatory teenage girl vaccinations. Research into how it can prevent anal cancer and save the lives of the aberrant would be too much of a political and investor hot potato. I still find it dispicable that these 'designer vaccinations' are created at obsecene expense to 'cure' a group of the mostly highly treatable first world cancers if detected early, in an EXTREMELY small portion of a population who can pay for it. But a Malaria vaccine could prevent the deaths of millions of poor people around the world, call it corporate genocide.

Lives of the aberrant?!?

Whatever. I think curing any kind of cancer is job well done.

You seem to have a very uninformed view of how research is done. Of course companies are only going to research what is going to profit them. This is called capitalism, not corporate genocide.

I think you are taking my comment about aberrant people wrong. It was meant to be sarcastic. Bottom line is, drug companies pay for the FDA and for independent research, and none of them are going to fund a study aimed at determining the effectiveness of a vaccine which could save the lives of gay people. Most gay people live above the poverty line, most have health insurance, and many would pay for a vaccine that could prevent a cancer. That kind of deflates your arguement of capitalism. But the point you make is totally valid in that drug companies are more concerned with the dollar they can make tomorrow, than the billions they could possibly make in the developing world if average life expectancy was raised to even 2/3's of what it is in the developed world. Maybe you can tell from my avatar, I'm not a huge fan of capitalism, but I don't think IT is evil, just those who use it to accumulate obscene wealth without care or concern for the rest of us.

my thoughts exactly well until the malaria thing anyhow hehe
ya went somewhere with that ... and to voodoo they didn't cure anything.

No, I didn't realize your comment was sarcastic. Sarcasm doesn't translate well in text. I would take issue with "most" gay people being able to afford a vaccine. Do they? And wouldn't these people be the ones more likely to be informed about health risks and therefore less likely to need an HPV vaccine?

I don't see drug companies ever changing. The people in charge got there by not being altruistic. They have no method of comprehending that an outlay of money would yield bigger returns later. Besides, by the time a malaria vaccine became available to the poor people in third world countries, it would probably have become generic and would mean no profit to the company.

You can't put all the blame on the drug companies. Put some of it on the gov't structure of countires like Africa, which are mad corrupted. There's plenty of surplus food for example, but no way of getting it to the people who need it. Also some blame can be put on the ignorance of the populace you're trying to help. For example, WHO tried releasing irradiated male mosquitoes in malaria-stricken areas in Africa (the males would breed with the females but not be able to produce eggs) but were stopped by residents who thought they were trying to sterilze African men via mosquito! Same problem with people not using condoms to prevent the spread of AIDS and other stds.