As with any disease, the less places that there are where the disease can dwell and incubate, the less disease there will be harming any given population overall. Reducing the chances of your child becoming infected with HPV also reduces the chances of everyone from becoming infected from HPV.

I also don’t really buy the “if we vaccinate our children against STD’s they will go out and have sex” line of reasoning. If you vaccinate when the children are young of age, along with all the other vaccinations I don’t think they will really think about it at all, unless everybody makes a big deal out of it.

All diseases can be spread by behavior, but why treat a disease spread primarily by intimate contact as big of a deal as one spread by sneezing? The person sneezing in a crowded elevator is going to infect a lot more people than someone sleeping around is. And if the disease is SARS, the consequences may be much ore dire.

The essential assumption is that one can only “get” HPV or HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases by making a choice to do so by engaging in “risky behavior”. But thats not always the case. What do you tell your daughter who just got HPV or HIV from being raped that you as a parent could have protected her from getting the disease (if not the rape) but chose not to? What do you tell her husband? Or what do you tell her infant that may catch the disease in her womb?

It seems to me that provided the vaccine is safe, not getting your child vaccinated is in of itself highly “risky behavior”.

I think that as both parents and citizens, people have a moral obligation to get their children and themselves vaccinated.