politics

Yvonne Prettner Solon survived one type of cancer and lost her husband to another. So she thought everyone would be as excited as she was about a new vaccine to prevent cervical cancer.

She was wrong.

In the face of opposition from vaccine critics and others, Prettner Solon, a DFL state senator from Duluth, is backing off a proposal to require the vaccine, Gardasil, for Minnesota schoolgirls 12 and older.

"I thought parents would embrace this [and] say, 'Oh my gosh, here's one cancer I can protect my daughter from,' " she said.

Instead, she discovered "that people are scared about a new vaccine, and they're scared about a mandate." As a result, Prettner Solon plans to call for a task force to study the issue instead.

The vaccine was approved last year to protect girls and young women from a sexually transmitted virus called HPV, or human papillomavirus, which can cause cervical cancer and genital warts.

According to a study being released today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, U.S. scientists reported that nearly 27 percent of women ages 14 to 59 have some form of HPV, although only 3 percent have one of the strains covered by the new vaccine.

However, those few strains are blamed for an estimated 70 percent of the cervical cancers that kill nearly 4,000 American women each year.

The study published today found the highest rate of HPV -- nearly 45 percent -- among women ages 20 to 24, according to researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In January, a national report ranked Minnesota first in the nation in efforts to combat cervical cancer through screening and other measures. It also said Minnesota has one of the lowest rates of cervical cancer in the nation, about 6.8 cases per 100,000 women.

Safety, morality backlash

In the past few weeks, a national campaign --by the vaccine's manufacturer and a group called Women in Government -- to mandate the vaccine for preteen girls has prompted a backlash in many state capitals, in part because of concerns about safety and morality.

Opposition mounted so quickly in Minnesota that two original co-sponsors removed their names from the House version of Prettner Solon's bill.

"When this bill came out I thought, 'How wonderful that we have a vaccine,' " said Rep. Sandra Peterson, DFL-New Hope. But at town meetings, her constituents raised so many questions about the disease and the vaccine that she decided to withdraw her support.

"Even though there was an opt-out provision," she said, the word "mandate" made people leery. "Do I think we should have it? Yes," she said. But "we need to have more knowledge about the disease and the vaccine before we mandate it."

Rep. Maria Ruud, DFL-Minnetonka, also withdrew as a sponsor.

Some critics are offended by the idea of requiring preteen girls to be vaccinated against a sexually transmitted disease. Others worry that it's too soon to embrace a vaccine that has been on the market for less than a year.

"I'm looking at safety," said Chris Abel of Crystal, a vaccine critic who founded a group called Vaccine Awareness Minnesota. "You're injecting something into a healthy young female three times. And obviously if it's effective, wonderful, but you want to make sure that there's not a tradeoff."