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US health authorities on Friday urged all boys age 11-12 to get a routine vaccination against the most common sexually transmitted disease, human papillomavirus, or HPV.

Other changes as part of an annual update to US immunization schedules included a recommended hepatitis B vaccine to the protect the livers of adults up to age 60 who have diabetes and a vaccine against whooping cough for pregnant women…

The HPV vaccine has been approved for girls since 2006 but the CDC had not expressly urged it for boys, though boys were included among those who could receive it to prevent certain cancers and genital warts. Health experts have expressed hope that if pre-teen boys and girls are both encouraged to get the vaccine, the rate of infection will decrease in the general population.

About half of all sexually active adults will get HPV in their lifetime. There are more than 100 types of HPV, and most clear the body on their own, but some strains can linger and lead to cervical, anal or oral cancer…

The vaccine, currently recommended for girls age 11-26, has faced resistance from some parents over fears that immunizing young girls would encourage them to be promiscuous…

Which is about the dumbest piece of reasoning this side of legislation that says the Earth is flat.

I haven’t scoured it for details, yet – but, I imagine crap beliefs like this one is there in all its glory.

More Americans than last year believe the world is warming and the change is likely influenced by the Republican presidential debates, a Reuters/Ipsos poll said on Thursday.

The percentage of Americans who believe the Earth has been warming rose to 83 percent from 75 percent last year in the poll conducted Sept 8-12. Republican presidential candidates, aside from Jon Huntsman, have mostly blasted the idea that emissions from burning fossil fuels and other human actions are warming the planet.

The current front-runner, Texas Governor Rick Perry, has accused scientists of manipulating climate data while Michele Bachmann has said climate change is a hoax.

As Americans watch Republicans debate the issue, they are forced to mull over what they think about global warming, said Jon Krosnick, a political science professor at Stanford University. And what they think is also influenced by reports this year that global temperatures in 2010 were tied with 2005 to be the warmest year since the 1880s.

“That is exactly the kind of situation that will provoke the public to think about the issue in a way that they haven’t before,” Krosnick said about news reports on the Republicans denying climate change science…

While more Americans believe in global warming, the skeptics are becoming more entrenched in their belief that it is not happening. In 2010 the certainty of skeptics was 35 percent, while it was 53 percent in 2011. Again, the Republican climate skeptics are influencing that, Krosnick said.

Ask someone a serious question, someone with a modicum of education and willingness to learn and evaluate information gained by scientific means – and rejected by opportunist looneybirds – and they begin to walk away from conservative political correctness that says human beings should ignore responsibility.

On the other hand…

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C-130J-30 and WC-130J flying over Katrina repairs in progress

The National Hurricane Center says it successfully predicted Hurricane Irene’s North Carolina landfall over the weekend and its destructive route up the U.S. East Coast.

But if members of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives wielding the budget ax in Washington have their way, future accurate forecasting may not be guaranteed and even curtailed, critics including hurricane experts say. Proposed cuts in the budget of the U.S. weather agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and in funding for new satellites to help improve severe storm warnings, could undermine the NHC’s forecasting ability.

“There are certain people that think all we have to do is cut spending,” Florida Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, told reporters in a visit to NHC headquarters in Miami on Thursday.

Nelson said that defunding NOAA programs that provide “hurricane hunter” aircraft for researching the intensity and track of hurricanes was “like cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

Well in advance, the Miami-based hurricane center came within about 10 miles of pinpointing the location where the center of Irene came barreling across North Carolina’s Outer Banks on Saturday in its first U.S. landfall.

This remarkable precision, especially given the massive size of the storm, has been credited with reducing costs by preventing unnecessary evacuations and other preparations, and probably saving lives…

Cuts proposed by a committee of the Republican-controlled House include a 42 percent reduction in funding for NOAA’s “hurricane hunter” planes, Nelson said.

Bill Read, the National Hurricane Center director, called the instrument-packed aircraft the “backbone” of storm surveillance and one of the big reasons the United States consistently does a much better job forecasting the track of a storm than any other country around the globe…

“It is our only real tool to know exactly what’s going on at the time we put out our advisory on the structure and the intensity of the storm,” Read added, referring to the closely watched hurricane forecast updates issued by the Miami center.

I can’t think of anything polite to say about Know-Nothing Congress-Creeps who would cut science budgets that provide specific life-supporting services as an immediate result of their research. The economic benefits alone are significant and should be – even to dimwits whose idea of weather forecasting is wetting one finger and sticking it in the air to see which way the wind is blowing.

Young parents in America are holy and not to be messed with. If they say something is correct, we all acquiesce. And is there any man, woman or canine who doesn’t leap out of the way when one of those giant, all-terrain Bugaboo strollers comes barreling down the sidewalk..?

Yet there’s one smug subgroup whose sense of entitlement endangers the rest. No, not poor Medicaid moms or Social Security grannies. The treacherous group is those parents, predominately those of some financial means, who refuse to vaccinate their children…

General worry became specific controversy in 1998, when the Lancet, a respected medical journal, published a paper by U.K. physician Andrew Wakefield and others saying that the standard vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella might cause autism. Later studies couldn’t confirm Wakefield’s findings, and the Lancet retracted the paper in 2010.

More recently, Wakefield has been barred from practice because of his phonied study.

Yet many parents still won’t vaccinate their kids. Some people in the U.S. have made an avocation of trying to secure a so-called personal belief waiver to allow their children to attend school without vaccines. Parents of autistic youngsters turned to the courts to blame drugmakers…

An unvaccinated boy from New York contracted mumps while in the U.K., then traveled home and attended summer camp. Within six months, hundreds of cases of mumps were counted, including some that led to pancreatitis, deafness and meningitis, Dr. Paul Offit wrote. A child in Minnesota died of Haemophilus B influenza after his parents opposed vaccinations. In January 2008, an unvaccinated child flew home to San Diego following a trip to Switzerland, and gave the gift of measles to dozens of others, including three children in a doctor’s waiting room.

Marin County, known for the fitness of its citizens, endured 15 percent of California’s whooping cough cases in 2010, even though it accounts for less than 1 percent of the state’s population. Ten children died, none of whom had been vaccinated…

Crowdsourcing medical care is about the dumbest thing parents can do. Relying on word-of-mouth myth and conspiracy theories is worse. People who endanger their kids – end up endangering everyone else.

The Web is an amazing tool for accumulating information. Try to remember that some of that information is crap. Science rarely has overnight revelations. It takes years of peer-reviewed publication and – more important – debate and more testing within those peer circles to move discovery forward.

Tempers are flaring in Texas over controversial proposed changes to the US state’s public school curriculum. The changes, put forward by the Board of Education’s conservative members, include referring to the slave trade as the “Atlantic triangular trade”…

The changes eliciting the most concern include diminishing the role Thomas Jefferson – principal author of the Declaration of Independence – in history courses because of his belief in the separation of church and state, and dropping references to a landmark court case that barred schools from segregating Mexican American students…

The new curriculum would emphasise the role of religion in America’s founding, as well as promoting the superiority of the capitalist system.

The Board insists, though, that capitalism will only be referred to as “free enterprise system”, largely because of the negative connotations of the word capitalism.

Criticism of 1950s McCarthyism, where suspected communists were aggressively questioned before government inquisitors, would also be toned down.

Rod Paige, who served as Secretary of Education under President George W Bush, urged the Board to delay its vote…

“What students are taught should not be the handmaiden of political ideology.”

The ideologues whose agenda is premised upon revising history via the Texas Board of Education aren’t especially different from those who preceded them in history – in Kansas, in Tennessee. They would turn back the clock of ignorance to keep students from evolution, constitutional separation of state and church, a modern understanding of science and society.

They prefer to alter the role of government from one of management to indoctrination. All the crap they prate about liberal government, they practice themselves. To suit the politics dedicated to the bigotry and backwardness of the Confederacy.

Rekers and companion photographed on their return trip

Shamed anti-gay activist George Rekers has resigned from the board of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality – a month after holidaying with a rent boy.

He left the organisation “to allow myself the time necessary to fight the false media reports that have been made against me,” he said in a statement issued earlier today…

The escort in question, who has been called “Lucien,” “Geo” and “Jo-vanni” in news reports, has told various media outlets that he gave Rekers daily massages in the nude during the trip, which included genital touching…

In a message to the Joe.My.God. blog, Rekers said no one should be surprised he was found in the company of a male escort.

“Like Jesus Christ, I deliberately spend time with sinners with the loving goal to try to help them,” Rekers wrote. “Like John the Baptist and Jesus, I have a loving Christian ministry to homosexuals and prostitutes in which I share the Good News of Jesus Christ with them. … If you talk with my travel assistant that the story called ‘Lucien,’ you will find I spent a great deal of time sharing scientific information on the desirability of abandoning homosexual intercourse, and I shared the Gospel of Jesus Christ with him in great detail.”

Sounds like there was a great deal of sharing. Except for delusions.

The folks at rentboy.com are enjoying a surge in business from the free publicity – and have issued their own statement in answer to Rekers’ reeks:

“We remain open-minded and devoted to privacy for the people who use our site, but we can’t take the risk out of leading a double life, or having a closeted or hypocritical career… If you’re a famous heterosexual homophobe and you appear in public with a rentboy with your pants down, you’re just asking for trouble.

If you would like to Take a Pornstar or Male Escort on Vacation, Rentboy.com is where you’ll find him. Excess baggage can indeed be heavy and there is nothing like a hot man to help you unload it.”

MPs…strongly criticised the University of East Anglia for not tackling a “culture of withholding information” among the climate change scientists whose private emails caused a furore after being leaked online in November.

The parliamentary science and technology select committee was scathing about the “standard practice” among the climate science community of not routinely releasing all its raw data and computer codes – something the committee’s chair, Phil Willis MP, described as “reprehensible”. He added: “That practice needs to change and it needs to change quickly.”

• There was no evidence to challenge the “scientific consensus” that global warming is induced by human activities…

• On peer review, “the evidence we have seen does not suggest that Jones was trying to subvert the peer review process” and academics should not be criticised for “informal comments” on papers, MPs said…

Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment said the report, “does not really shed any more light on the controversy surrounding the emails … and will not stop the conspiracy theories being spread by so-called ‘sceptics’.

Of course not. Skepticism not founded on reasonable peer-reviewed science is political balderdash, nothing more.

Prof. Jones resigned when this blew up – and the parliamentary committee has recommended he return to the University and resume his research and teaching.

Carbon dioxide is “essentially harmless” to human beings and good for plants. So now will you stop worrying about global warming?

Utah’s House of Representatives apparently has at least. Officially the most Republican state in America, its political masters have adopted a resolution condemning “climate alarmists”, and disputing any scientific basis for global warming.

The measure, which passed by 56-17, has no legal force, though it was predictably claimed by climate change sceptics as a great victory…

But it does offer a view of state politicians’ concerns in Utah which is a major oil and coal producing state…

Representative Mike Noel said environmentalists were part of a vast conspiracy to destroy the American way of life and control world population through forced sterilisation and abortion.

By the time the final version of the bill came to a vote, cooler heads apparently prevailed. The bill dropped the word “conspiracy”, and described climate science as “questionable” rather than “flawed”…

As Noel explained: “Sometimes … we need to have the courage to do nothing.”

As we all know, Republicans don’t really need encouragement to “do nothing”. Obstructionism, insofar as it delays jobs, public health, education or civil rights – is a Republican folk art.

David Nutt, the scientist sacked as a government adviser by the home secretary, has defiantly launched his own independent committee which he says will provide the definitive scientific verdict on the risks of drugs.

Nutt said his committee was willing to give advice to the government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), from which he was sacked as chair. He was dismissed from the post after criticising politicians for distorting research evidence and for claiming alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than some illegal drugs, including LSD, ecstasy and cannabis.

The new committee – called the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD) – includes a number of big names in the field and has the potential to embarrass the government, due to its determination to make public the evidence on the relative risks and harms of drugs without regard to political sensitivities.

Nutt portrayed the ACMD as something of a lame duck scientifically, following the resignations of five of its members in sympathy with him – four of whom have joined the ISCD. “It is a body made up of drug treatment people, police and magistrates,” he said…

The committee will pursue a similar agenda to that which Nutt was sacked for supporting. “We will undoubtedly pull together an assessment of the science, which is likely to challenge some of the aberrations in the current act,” he said.

Politicians with aberrant views on science are nothing new to those of us in creationist heaven, west of the Big Pond, south of the Great White North.

Between Christian nutballs, politicians who are world-class hypocrites – and media giants who rate news about science in terms of entertainment value – some of us will be watching Dr. Nutt’s progress with sympathy.

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As many as 80 million Americans have been infected with H1N1 swine flu, up to 16,000 have been killed and more than 360,000 hospitalized, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday.

But 90 percent of the most vulnerable people remain unvaccinated, with only about 61 million Americans having received shots, the CDC said…

The pandemic, which began in March, is on the wane but health officials stress that influenza is unpredictable and could come back or mutate.

And this new virus, while it has not caused more deaths than seasonal influenza, has killed younger people than seasonal flu does.

About 90 percent of deaths in an average year are among people over 65, while 90 percent of those seriously ill or killed by the new virus are much younger and include as many as 1,730 children.

Health experts say vaccination is by far the best way to ensure the virus does not come back or mutate into a new and more dangerous form, but the vaccine rolled out slowly and the public is now skeptical of the need to be vaccinated…

More pregnant women than usual have been vaccinated — 38 percent as compared to between 15 percent and 25 percent in an average year. Pregnant women are always at high risk from any flu and they accounted for an unusually high percentage of those sickened and killed by H1N1…

The usual anti-science brigade continue their agitprop: religious anti-vaccine nutballs, right-wing Republicans and neolithic libertarians both of whom hate government as strongly as any middle-class undergraduate anarchist.

I don’t especially mind their lockstep march into Darwinian risk; but, I have only contempt for the effect their blathering has on the general public, skeptical enough after eight years of spooky anti-intellectualism from Bush League conservatives.