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Comment by potato3732842 | Hacker News Reader

You could probably have gotten away with it a decade ago but that is a very poor plan in the far more critical of public health world of today.

Statistically nobody even knows a guy who knows a guy who's dick fell off. Serious HPV problems for men are not even common enough to be viable urban legend. You have less to back up your DARE messaging than DARE did. It's just not gonna work. The nanosecond someone who took your bait shows up to be interviewed by some Youtube talking head about side effects the already severely damaged (compared to, IDK a decade ago) credibility of the medical establishment will go up in flames.

You need to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth and let people make their own decisions. People don't "trust the experts" anymore at the scale you need for stuff like vaccination campaigns so you have to operate based on that reality.

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Apparently HPV is responsible for some ~70% of throat cancers and ~30% of penile cancers in men. Seems pretty significant to me.

If nobody knows a guy who knows a guy who had penile cancer, that's probably because people are very bad about talking about genital health. I'm sure some of the men in my life have issues with erectile dysfunction, enlarged prostates, hemmorrhoids, etc. But no one is talking about those issues.

70% of throat cancers? In a world with cigarettes and chewing tobacco? I find that a very surprising number - so surprising it's almost unbelievable.

Got a source?

Think of it as shared responsibility. The tobacco and the virus are both reasons why you got cancer and died, prizes for all.

So maybe 70% of throat cancer victims have HPV, and like 70% smoked - and if those were independent facts you'd expect that about 49% both smoked and had HPV, but it's actually more than half 'cos it turns out that if you have HPV then smoking is even worse. So that's nice.

"Currently, the estimated proportion of oropharyngeal cancers testing positive for HPV within the United States is 68%–70%"[0]

[0] https://www.asha.org/practice-portal/clinical-topics/head-an...

And how many men get throat and penile cancers vs other cancers and health issues? There's a reason old men crack jokes about prostate health, erectile dysfunction and incontinence rather than their dicks falling off and are way more worried about colon cancer than rectal cancer.

I didn't say it wasn't a significant source of cancer. I said that nobody knows a guy who knows a guy who's dick fell off or some other extreme outcome. Without enough of that to back up your messaging it just won't work. You need to be honest with people, not try and scare them like you're trying to keep school kids from smoking weed in 1990.

The public messaging you're trying to engage in could perhaps have skated by in a less critical time but in the current environment it will be counterproductive.

I don't want my kid or my grandkid to get measles or some other "of immediate consequence" disease because they go to school with a bunch of unvaccinated kids because you people sullied the reputation of public health via "just push the truth a little, it'll make them take the vaccine" type endeavors.

> "you people"

JFC. I'm checking out of this conversation.

HPV is also responsible for very unsightly genital warts. I'd think people would want to avoid that if possible.

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