A study published Wednesday
by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the
prevalence of high-risk strains in teenage girls dropped by half after
the vaccine was introduced in 2006, from 7.2 percent in 2006 to 3.6
percent in 2010.
No comment from Michelle Bachmann on the success of the vaccine that (she maintained on national television) can make your kid retarded. There is still a ways to go:
Unfortunately, many parents still resist having their daughters immunized. A study published in March
found that 44 percent of parents said in 2010 that they did not intend
to vaccinate their daughters, up from 40 percent in 2008. . . .
Increasing the vaccination rate to 80 percent in this
country could prevent an additional 53,000 cervical cancers and 17,000
deaths among girls now 13 years old and younger over the course of their
lives.
. . . but for now let us savior this little moment of win. It works, bitches. If we let it.
One of these creatures has been alive for four hundred thousand years. It's incredible.
The most common measure of climate change is how the world is going to look in 2100. That's a useful signpost, but when you look at an 80,000-year-old tree, you can't help reflect on the narrowness of our horizons. The world's going to continue to turn, and the physics of greenhouse gases continue to operate, in 2101 and 2150 and 2200.
Should we think about how the world will look after we're gone? Should we worry about destroying unique patterns of life that have weathered nature's changes since before humanity came down from the trees?
We would be in a bad way if the Greeks and the Romans and the Caliphate hadn't had any concern for the next century or the next millennium. The cultural heritage, and the institutions of democracy and human liberty which grew out of them, would be gone. Billions of people around the globe build their lives around principles and precepts of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism -- the youngest of which is more than a thousand years old.
Our modern world-spanning civilization is the richest, the most scientifically advanced society ever to emerge on this earth. Most of the people in past eras could not begin to conceive of it. It's richness is a result, in no small part, of the labors of philosophers, scientists, and artists, proselytizers and engineers of the last 5,000 years. They knew they were working for a future that stretched much further than a few decades, and we are all the beneficiaries of that legacy.
Have we now as a people embraced the role of the spoiled child, to be given everything and value nothing, work for nothing? Are we so rich and our lives so easy that the concept of building for the future has lost all meaning for us?
