Overview: Breast Cancer Research/Treatment vs Merck’s Big Payday
The furor of the FDA’s rapid approval of Merck HPV Vaccine (Gardasil) and the ‘pre/post vaccine approval’ marketing and legislative blitzkrieg by Merck is now turning into jaw-dropping sticker-shock.
The cost of ‘immunizing’ over 21 million sixth-grade girls in the United States today, at $360 for a three-shot series — is not millions of dollars but billions of dollars in profit for the Merck Pharmaceutical Company. Money that will come from Medicaid, Fed/State funded children’s insurance programs. This will be one of the larges transfers of capital from public to private hands in history. This HPV Vaccine program is moving on greased skids, without a whole lot of intelligent questioning from our elected or regulatory “representatives”.
Ignoring the fact we are trusting our daughter’s uteruses to the same company that brought us Vioxx — let us just take a moment and look at the relative threat a woman faces from Breast cancer vs. Cervical cancer. My thoughts are, that our money (and no matter what our State and Federal legislators think — it is our money they are spending) should be focused on the greatest threat… and that threat is certainly not Cervical cancer.
How Many Women Get Breast Cancer?
Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women in the United States, other than skin cancer. It is the second leading cause of cancer death in women, after lung cancer.
About 182,460 women in the United States will be found to have invasive breast cancer in 2008. About 40,480 women will die from the disease this year. Right now there are about two and a half million breast cancer survivors in the United States.
The chance of a woman having invasive breast cancer some time during her life is about 1 in 8. The chance of dying from breast cancer is about 1 in 35. Breast cancer death rates are going down. This is probably the result of finding the cancer earlier and improved treatment.
Compared To How many women will get Cervical Cancer
In 2007 there will be about 3,670 deaths from cervical cancer in the United States, and the vast majority of these cases will be in patients who have never had a PAP test, or cervical screening. According to the latest U.S. Census Bureau, there are approximately 301,718,307 people in the United States, and about half of those are women (150,859,152). Statistically speaking the death rate due to cervical cancer is approx 0.002% or 1 in 50,000.
Source: American Cancer Society
U.S. Census Bureau
