Spammers now clogging blogs, IM - Security

Spammers now clogging blogs, IM

Personal Web journals grow cell phones, instant messages

By By Matthew Fordahl

SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov. 14, 2003 - Three years ago, Adam Kalsey set up a Web log to share his thoughts about online business and the digital revolution. Like countless otherness bloggers, he lets his readers post comments on his entries. Recently, his site has been getting remarks like Thanks for the information! and Sounds great! They??�re not from supporters, but from group ??" or machines ??" who leave names like Generic Sildenafil, Online Gambling and Free Poker and links to unsavory sites.

Spam has never been limited to e-mail. But now, commercial pitches are increasingly popping up in online chats, instant messages, cell phones with text messaging and, as Kalsey found, Web log comments.

Spammers are flocking to new communications tools like moths to light, threatening to cripple these tools just as they are beginning to take off.

Howard Rheingold, a futurist who predicts always-on communication will revolutionize public discourse, is worried that all these new forms of spam could freeze the revolution in its tracks. There will be no great social transformation if cell phones are turned off, instant messenger programs shut down or blog comments disabled to halt the flow of offers for online porn or cheap drugs.

It forces you to either turn off the comments and lose some of the value of the medium, or spend your time deleting spam, said Rheingold, who runs his own blog.

Today, most of the attention of lawmakers has been on e-mail spam, which is estimated to comprise nearly half of e-mail traffic. Attempts to write broader laws have not succeeded, and might whittle away at free speech.

We ought to be legislating general concepts ??" things like, you can??�t market to somebody who??�s asked you not to, said David Sorkin, a professor who studies spam laws at John Marshall Law School. But in the case of spam in particular, that hasn??�t really worked.

It??�s possible legislation targeting unwanted e-mail could be used to fight otherness unwanted communication; text messages on cell phones often originate from e-mail. Laws limiting telemarketing also might be useful.

But that assumes the legislation will work, and that spammers won??�t move outside the law.

'Blog immune system' at work
Kalsey, a Web consultant who lives near Sacramento, Calif., has taken matters into his own hands. In fact, many of his comments of late have focused on combatting Web log spam, including the creation of a Comment Spam Manifesto.

What you failed to understand is that bloggers are smarter, better connected and more technologically savvy than the average e-mail user, it reads, addressing the spammers. We control this medium that you are now attempting to exploit. You??�ve picked a fight with us and it??�s a fight you cannot win.

Working from the theory that blog spam can be combatted like real-world graffiti, Kalsey tried deleting messages as fast as they appeared. That worked for a few weeks but the volume has recently been increasing.

Now he??�s tracking down those who leave the comments, collecting evidence and reporting them to their Internet providers and domain registers so their accounts can be canceled. If it sounds like a lot of work, it is. Fortunately, help from othernesss is available.

The blog immune system does seem to be responding, said Kalsey. People are coming up with collective solutions like black lists for spammers. If one person gets spammed, then all the othernesss who use that software can ban them.

Most of today??�s comment spam doesn??�t urge someone to click on the link. Rather, it??�s posted to boost a site??�s position on search engines. Web crawling software robots released by search engines notice keywords and links, and that information is used to determine relevancy.

Mena Trott, chief executive of Six Apart, the maker of the popular Web log system Movable Type, said the company is working on updates to make deletion of unwanted messages easier.

Convenience factor eroded
Cell phone carriers and providers of instant messaging services, meanwhile, are finding that their spam problems can be much more disruptive to workflow.

For IM, spam is growing just as the technology jumps from personal to business communications. To address the problem, companies are blocking messages from outsiders, instituting white lists of accepted contacts or not allowing IM at all.

But that??�s making messaging less convenient.

In (corporate) instant messaging, we??�re doing more of a closed approach than what we were seeing with e-mail, said Paul Judge, chief technology officer of the antispam firm CipherTrust Inc. and co-chair of the Anti-Spam Research Group.

America Online, the largest instant-messaging provider, has a number of roadblocks in place to halt spam IM, or spim. Among otherness things, a software sentry looks for spammers ??" automated or in-the-flesh ??" who try to send multiple messages simultaneously to many group, said spokesman Nicholas Graham.

Cell phone text message spam can be even more disruptive ??" and expensive.

Some Nextel Communications cell phone subscribers recently got a 3:30 a.m. message urging support of the workers in the southern California grocery strike. Anotherness spammer urged a vote in favor of recalling California Gov. Gray Davis.

Aside from early morning annoyance, some plans charge for each message sent or received. Nextel, which last month installed a filtering system, offers refunds to any customers who complain.

All the carriers have been hit with situations like this, said Nextel spokeswoman Mila Fairfax. Each carrier has applied a filtering system to try to flag messages that appear suspicious to our system.

We will be going after (spammers) to the furthest extent of law, Fairfax said. Anything we can do, we will do.

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Sexed-up seniors do it more than you'd think - Sexual health

Sexed-up seniors do it more than you'd think

Unprecedented U.S. survey finds older group lead steamy private lives
NBC video?�Seniors staying sexually active
Aug. 22: An unprecedented meditate finds seniors are staying sexually active well into their golden years.?� NBC??�s Robert Bazell reports.

Nightly News

An unprecedented meditate of sex and seniors finds that many older group are surprisingly frisky ??" willing to do, and talk about, intimate acts that would make their grandchildren blush.

That may be too much information for some folks.

But it comes from the most comprehensive sex survey ever done among 57- to 85-year-olds in the United States. Sex and interest in it do fall off when group are in their 70s, but more than a quarter of those up to age 85 reported having sex in the previous year.

And the drop-off has a lot to do with health or lack of a partner, especially for women, the survey found.

The federally funded meditate , done by respected scientists and published in Thursday??�s New England Journal of Medicine, overturns some stereotypical notions that physical pleasure is just a young person??�s game.

Most group assume that group stop doing it after some vague age, said sex researcher Edward Laumann of the University of Chicago.

However, more than half of those aged 57 to 75 said they gave or received oral sex, as did about a third of 75- to 85-year-olds.

Bravo??� says Dr. Ruth
Bravo that the New England Journal of Medicine is publishing something like that. It??�s about time, said Ruth Westheimer, better known as sexpert Dr. Ruth, who has long counseled seniors on sex.

The survey involved two-h.face-to-face interviews with 3,005 men and women around the country. Researchers also took blood, saliva and otherness samples that will tell about hormone levels, sex-related infections and otherness health issues in future reports. They even agsdhfgdfed how well seniors could see, taste, hear and smell ??" things that affect being able to have and enjoy sex.

Some results:

Sex with a partner in the previous year was reported by 73 percent of group ages 57 to 64; 53 percent of those ages 64 to 75, and 26 percent of group 75 to 85. Of those who were active, most said they did it two to three times a month or more.Women at all ages were less likely to be sexually active than men. But they also lacked partners; far more were widowed.People whose health was excellent or very good were nearly twice as likely to be sexually active as those in poor or fair health.Half of group having sex reported at least one related problem. Most common in men was erection trouble (37 percent); in women, low desire (43 percent), vaginal dryness (39 percent) and inability to have an orgasm (34 percent).One out of seven men used Sildenafil or otherness substances to improve sex.Only 22 percent of women and 38 percent of men had discussed sex with a doctor since age 50.

The survey had a remarkable 75 percent response rate. Only 2 percent to 7 percent did not answer questions about sexual activities or problems, although a higher percentage declined to reveal how often they masturbate.

Why do this research? Sex is an important indicator of health, said Georgeanne Patmios of the National Institute on Aging, the meditate ??�s main funder.

Sexual problems can be a warning sign of Hypersensitivity reaction, infections, cancer or otherness health woes. Untreated sex issues can lead to depression and social withdrawal, and group may even stop taking needed drugs because of sexual side effects, the researchers wrote.

Some of them did a landmark meditate of sexual habits in younger group a decade ago, but little is known about X-rated behaviors beyond Generation X.

This subject has been taboo for so long that many older group haven??�t even talked to their spouses about their sexual problems, let alone a physician, said the lead author, Dr. Stacy Tesser Lindau, a University of Chicago gynecologist.

Many doctors are embarrassed to bring it up, and some may not know how to treat sexual dysfunction, said Dr. Alison Moore, a geriatrics specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who had no role in the meditate .

Click for related content

Survey: Does sex get better with age?
Age doesn't hinder steamy sex lives, readers say
Q&A with Dr. Ruth on sex and the senior
Even Grandma had premarital sex

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Herbal a cure little help for menopause - Women's health

Herbal a cure little help for menopause

Black cohosh not effective in relieving hot flashes, meditate finds

PHILADELPHIA - A popular herbal a cure called black cohosh is practically ineffective at relieving hot flashes and night sweats in women going through menopause, a meditate found.

The findings were disappointing news for women seeking alternatives to estrogen-progestin hormone supplements, which have been linked to breast cancer and heart problems.

The yearlong meditate of 351 women suffering from hot flashes and night sweats found that those given black cohosh got about the same amount of relief as those who took a placebo. And those groups saw nothing close to the improvement in women on hormones.

“It’s disappointing news,” said Katherine Newton, an epidemiologist who helped lead the meditate , funded by the National Institute on Aging and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. “It would be nice to offer something safe and effective.”

The meditate was conducted at Seattle-based Group Health, a health plan, and was published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Black cohosh �" an herb that is a member of the buttercup family and is commonly given to ease menopause symptoms �" is available in pill or liquid form and is sold over the counter in many health food stores and over the Internet.

Herbal supplements no help?
It is among a host of supplements including soy, wild yam, red clover and St. John’s wort that have been tried for relief of hot flashes and night sweats, but studies almost universally have found they don’t work.

Certain anti depression medicates have proved effective, and one company, Depomed Inc. of Menlo Park, Calif., plans to seek the (Food and Drug Administration)’s acceptance to sell an anti-seizure drug, gabapentin, for relief of hot flashes.

In the laagsdhfgdf meditate , some participants were given black cohosh, while othernesss received hormone supplements, a placebo or a botanical a cure that included black cohosh, alfalfa, licorice and ginseng.

Women taking the herbal a cures saw hot flashes reduced by only about half an episode per day compared with those taking the placebo, the meditate found. Those who got hormone medical care reduced their hot flashes by about four episodes per day when compared with the placebo.

Click for related contentDespite cancer risk, some women need hormonesBreast cancer rates decline sharplyTighter rules on trendy hormones urged

Behavioral changes may be best bet
Menopausal women can still make behavioral changes such as dressing in layers, sleeping in a cooler room and avoiding possible triggers such as very hot liquids and alcohol, Newton said. The meditate also shows that symptoms decreased over the course of the 12-month period and that they nearly always go away on their own.

The findings come less than a week after researchers reported a dramatic decline in U.S. breast cancer cases, a drop doctors attributed partially to fewer women using hormone medical care to treat menopause.

In 2002, a government meditate found a higher risk of breast cancer and heart problems occurred among women taking estrogen-progestin pills. Millions of women stopped taking the supplements. Doctors urged women with serious menopausal symptoms to use the lowest dose for as short a time as possible.

The laagsdhfgdf meditate , conducted between 2001 and 2004, could hurt hopes for herbal remedies.

“We hope that this is not it,” said Dr. Susan Reed, anotherness of the meditate ’s authors. “However, there’s not much that appears promising that is currently on the horizon.”

The news may not all be bad. Since women who took a placebo saw some improvement, experts say there is hope that some could get relief through meditation or self-hypnosis.

“If you can relax your mind appropriately, you can also relax your body,” said Barrie Cassileth, an alternative-medicine researcher at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who was not involved in the meditate . “If 30 percent of women could lose hot flashes because their mind made them do it, that’s fantastic.”

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Govt. brochure wrongly links abortion, cancer - Women's health

Govt. brochure wrongly links abortion, cancer

Government-issued literature clashes with scientific findings

WASHINGTON - In several states, women considering abortion are given government-issued brochures warning that the procedure could increase their chance of developing breast cancer, despite scientific findings to the contrary.

More than a year ago, a panel of scientists convened by the National Cancer Institute reviewed available data and concluded there is no link. A scientific review in the Lancet, a British medical journal, came to the same conclusion, questioning the methodology in studies that suggested a link.

The cancer information is distributed to women during mandatory waiting periods before abortions. In some cases, the information is on the states??� Web sites.

We??�re going to continue to educate the public about this, said Karen Malec, president of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer, an anti-abortion group. She dismissed the National Cancer Institute??�s findings as politically motivated and maintained that the link has been scientifically proven.

Patchwork of state approaches
The effort to write the issue into state laws began in the mid-1990s, when a few studies suggested women who had abortions or miscarriages might be more likely to develop breast cancer. The warnings are now required in Texas and Mississippi, and health officials in Kansas and Louisiana voluntarily issue them.

In Mississippi, women who want abortions must sign a form indicating they??�ve been told there is a medical risk of breast cancer. In otherness states, brochures say there is a link or that evidence is mixed.

Minnesota law requires the health department to include this information on its Web site, but the department backed down after an outcry from the state??�s medical community. Montana law also mandated the warning, but the state Supreme Court struck it down.

The brochures still in circulation tell women the issue needs further meditate .

They can do further research on their own and determine which of those studies they should put most attention on, said Sharon Watson, spokeswoman for the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. We??�re just trying to provide all the information it??�s possible to provide.

Changes coming in Louisiana
In Louisiana there will be changes, said Bob Johannessen, spokesman for the state??�s Department of Health and Hospitals. He said the department??�s new director did not know the state pamphlet included such information until contacted this week by .

If there is scientific evidence, and it certainly appears there now is, we would certainly make the necessary changes in that brochure, Johannessen said Tuesday.

The brochure, he said, is a reflection of the very, very strong pro-family, pro-life leaning of Louisiana.

Nonetheless, it??�s incumbent on us as the health agency to make sure any information is factually correct, he said. We don??�t want to be misleading women who are making this important choice.

A Democrat, Kathleen Blanco, was elected Louisiana governor last year, replacing a Republican.

Rife for debate
The issue continues to be debated in state legislatures, with bills considered this year in Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia.

On the federal level, several members of Congress complained last year after the NCI Web site included material suggesting a link between breast cancer and abortion or miscarriage. An expert panel that was asked to review the data reported in March 2003 that well established evidence shows no link.

Among the studies cited by the NCI expert panel was Danish research that used computerized medical records to compare women who had undergone abortions with that country??�s cancer registry and found no higher cancer rate.

Having an abortion or miscarriage does not increase a woman??�s subsequent risk of developing breast cancer, the NCI site now says.

Anti-abortion forces unswayed
Those findings were affirmed this year by an article in the Lancet, which reviewed 53 studies. Lancet found that studies that purported a link had flawed methodologies.

Still, anti-abortion activists are unconvinced.

Joel Brind, a biochemist at Baruch College in New York who advises the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer, noted that a woman??�s chances of getting breast cancer go down if she gives birth at a relatively young age. He reasons that those who opt for abortion are giving up a chance of reducing their breast cancer risk.

Therefore, he says, abortion increases the risk of cancer.

He dismisses the findings of the National Cancer Institute, calling it a political exercise, a charade if you will. He participated in those discussions and filed a minority report.

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Family of dead Israeli soldier can use his sperm - Men's health

Family of dead Israeli soldier can use his sperm

Court grants parents the right to impregnate stranger with son's sperm

JERUSALEM - In a precedent-setting decision, an Israeli court has ruled that a dead soldier’s family can use his sperm to impregnate a woman he never met.

Keivan Cohen, 20, was shot dead in 2002 by a Palestinian sniper in the Gaza Strip. He was single and left no will. But at the urging of his parents, a sample of his sperm was taken two hours after his death and has been stored in a hospital since.

When the family tried to gain access to the sperm, however, the hospital refused, on the ground that only a spouse could make such a request. Arguing that their son yearned to raise a family, his parents challenged that decision in court. And on Jan. 15, after a four-year legal battle, a Tel Aviv court granted the family’s wish and ruled that the sperm could be injected into a woman selected by Cohen’s family.

The ruling also ordered the Ministry of Interior to register any children born as a result of the insemination as children of the deceased.

“On the one hand I’m terribly sad that I don’t have my boy; it’s a terrible loss,” Rachel Cohen said in an interview in Monday’s Chicago Tribune. “But I’m also happy that I succeeded in carrying out my son’s will.”

Cohen did not return phone calls from .

Precedent-setting decision
Irit Rosenblum, a family rights advocate who represented the Cohen family, said the ruling was significant because it set a precedent for those seeking to continue bloodlines after death.

At the trial, Rosenblum presented agsdhfgdfimony, including video recordings, in which Cohen expressed his desire to have children.

“He always said he wanted children,” she told . “But there were no regulations in the law that deals with using sperm from dead group.”

Rosenblum said soldiers increasingly have been leaving sperm samples, or explicit instructions on post-mortem extraction, before heading to battle.

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She said she knew of more than 100 cases of Israeli soldiers who, before last summer’s war with Lebanese guerillas, asked to have their sperm saved if they were killed. American soldiers have also begun donating sperm before heading to Iraq, she said.

“I think it is a human revolution,” Rosenblum said. “Ten years ago, who would believe that a human being can continue after he has died. I think it is great for humanity.”

Rosenblum said the woman who is to act as surrogate motherness has requested to remain anonymous.

“She’s like family to us,” Rachel Cohen told the Tribune. “Cruel and good fate brought us together.”

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D.C. overpaid $97 mil. for Medicaid services - U.S. business

D.C. overpaid $97 mil. for Medicaid services

Funding at risk after audit findings highlight massive oversight

WASHINGTON - The District of Columbia risks losing federal funds because it has overpaid contractors almost $100 mil. for medical services, an audit found.

The D.C. Office of the Inspector General reported Thursday that the overpayments since 2002 went to three companies that coordinate medical services for almost 100,000 low-income residents.

William J. DiVello, assistant inspector general, said the auditors aren’t saying that companies did anything illegal, but that the “district just didn’t do a good job monitoring them.”

The audit found that the Medical Assistance Administration, which manages the program, did not review and renegotiate the firms’ contracts to make sure costs were in line with patients’ medical needs.

It also found fault with the agency’s “one size fits all” way of paying. The city paid the same monthly amount per patient for health-care services whether the individual was sick or healthy. If the contractors didn’t have to pay a doctor for a patient’s a cure, it could keep the funds.

The report said Amerigroup Maryland had received $74 mil. more than necessary for patient care since 2002, D.C. Chartered Health Plan was overpaid $17.5 mil., and Health Right received an extra $5.1 mil..

Only 64 cents of every D.C. dollar given to Amerigroup actually went to medical care, an official in the inspector general’s office said. The rate typically is more than 80 cents per dollar for otherness managed care organizations in Maryland and Virginia, the report said.

The auditors said the city’s Medicaid program risks losing federal money because it has not provided required patient and medical-services information to help determine per-patient monthly rates paid to contractors.

Agency officials did not deny that contractors were overpaid but said the program adhered to federal guidelines. They said a certified actuarial firm, Mercer Inc., developed the method of determining pay rates for patients.

Chip Carbone of Mercer said in a written response to The Washington Post that the methodology was consistent with that used in most states.

The city’s health director, Gregg A. Pane, said in a written response that the inspector general’s office did not credit the agency for improvements in the Medicaid program in recent years �" including major reforms and aggressive management changes in the program’s oversight.

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Red meat raises breast cancer risk - Women's health

Eating red meat may raise breast cancer risk

Taking vitamins won't protect against heart problems, new studies say

CHICAGO - Eating red meat may raise a woman’s risk of a common type of breast cancer, and vitamin supplements will do little if anything to protect her heart, two new studies suggest.

Women who ate more than 1½ servings of red meat per day were almost twice as likely to develop hormone-related breast cancer as those who ate fewer than three portions per week, one meditate found.

The otherness �" one of the longest and largest agsdhfgdfs of whether supplements of various vitamins can prevent heart problems and strokes in high-risk women �" found that the popular pills do no good, although there were hints that women with the highest risk might get some benefit from vitamin C.

The meat meditate was published in Monday’s Archives of Internal Medicine. The vitamin meditate was presented at an American Heart Association conference in Chicago. Both were led by doctors at Harvard Medical School and were aimed at two sicknesss women most fear and want to prevent.

Antioxidants like vitamins C and E attach to substances that can damage cells. Scientists have been agsdhfgdfing them for preventing such sicknesss as Alzheimer’s and cancer.

This is the first large meditate to agsdhfgdf vitamin C alone, not in combination with E or otherness vitamins, for heart health, said Dr. JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who led the research.

More than 8,000 women were randomly assigned to take vitamin C, E or beta carotene alone or in various combinations for nearly a decade. An additional 5,442 women took folic acid and B vitamin supplements for more than seven years.

“Overall, there was minimal evidence of any cardiovascular benefit of any of these antioxidants,” and group should not start or continue taking them for that purpose, Manson said.

Among the 3,000 women in the meditate who had no prior heart sickness but three or more risk factors for it, those who received vitamin C alone or in combination had a 42 percent lower risk of stroke. Smokers taking C also had a 48 percent lower risk.

Vitamin E could help a little
Vitamin E may give very small benefits for some women, the meditate suggests. Those with prior heart sickness had a 12 percent reduction in the risk of new heart problems, Manson said.Test yourself •Breast cancer: How much do you know?

“Many of these subgroup findings are intriguing. However, they need to be confirmed in otherness studies,” Manson said. “We don’t want this to be interpreted as a conclusive finding.”

What does appear conclusive is that folic acid and B vitamins “are not effective as preventive agents,” said Dr. Christine Albert, who presented that portion of the meditate at the heart meeting on Monday. These nutrients lower homocysteine, a blood substance thought to increase heart sickness risk, but many studies now call the importance of that into question.

The meat meditate was based on observation rather than an experiment. The Nurses’ Health Study tracked the diets and health of more than 90,000 women who were 26 to 46 years old when they enrolled roughly two decades ago.

They filled out diet questionnaires in 1991, 1995 and 1999, and were divided into five groups based on how much red meat they said they ate. Researchers checked on their health for 12 years on average and confirmed breast cancer diagnoses with medical records.

Meat consumption was linked to a risk of developing tumors whose growth was fueled by estrogen or progesterone �" the most common type �" but not to tumors that grow independently of these hormones.

The women who ate more red meat were more likely to smoke and be overweight, but when the researchers took those factors into account, they still saw that red meat was linked with an increased risk of breast cancer.

Red meat also raises risk of colorectal cancer
Earlier studies have found that obesity raises the risk of breast cancer and that red meat raises the risk of colorectal cancer.

“Our meditate may give anotherness motivation to reduce red meat intake,” said meditate co-author Eunyoung Cho.

Click for related content  Discuss: Will you change your diet?Coffee may fight breast cancer for some womenYoga may ease cancer pharmacomedical care side effects

However, Dr. Anne McTiernan of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle cautioned that the findings rely on women’s recall of what they ate �" an inexact way to measure diet.

“A 16-ounce steak and a three-ounce piece of meat are counted the same. People are horrible at determining what is a real serving,” said McTiernan, author of “Breast Fitness,” a book on reducing cancer risk.

It may be wise to cut down on red meat because of its fat and calorie content, McTiernan said, but “this isn’t a reason to become a vegetarian if you weren’t planning to do that already.”

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Panel backs HPV vaccine for girls - Women's health

Panel backs cancer vaccine for 11-year-old girls

Shots would protect against sexually transmitted sickness
Handout / Getty Images file
The Merck & Co manufactured Gardasil, approved by the Food and Drug Administration on June 8, prevents cervical cancer by blocking two forms of the human papillomavirus which cause 70 percent of all cervical cancer cases.

ATLANTA - An influential government advisory panel Thursday recommended that 11- and 12-year-old girls be routinely vaccinated against the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer.

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices also said the shots can be started for girls as young as 9, at the discretion of their doctors.

The committee’s recommendations usually are accepted by federal health officials, and influence insurance coverage for vaccinations.

Gardasil, made by Merck & Co., is the first vaccine specifically designed to prevent cancer. Approved earlier this month by the (Food and Drug Administration) for females ages 9 to 26, it protects against strains of the human papilloma virus, or HPV, which causes cervical, vulvar and vaginal cancers and genital warts.

Some health officials had girded themselves for arguments from religious conservatives and othernesss that vaccinating youngsters against the sexually transmitted virus might make them more likely to have sex. But the controversy never materialized in the panel’s public meetings.

Earlier this year, the Family Research Council, a conservative group, did not speak out against giving the HPV shot to young girls. The organization mainly opposes making it one of the vaccines required before youngsters can enroll in school, said the group’s policy analyst, Moira Gaul.

Health officials estimate that more than 50 percent of sexually active women and men will be infected with one or more types of HPV in their lifetimes. Vaccine proponents say it could dramatically reduce the nearly 4,000 cervical cancer deaths that occur each year in the United States.

Boys next?
The vaccine comes as a $360 series of three shots, and in agsdhfgdfs has been highly effective against HPV. The vaccine is formulated to address the subtypes of HPV responsible for 70 percent of cervical cancer cases and 90 percent of genital warts.

Scientists say the vaccine is most effective when given to girls before they become sexually active, and some girls become active before their teens. About 7 percent of children have had sexual intercourse before age 13, and about a quarter of boys and girls have had sex by age 15, according to government surveys.

Click for related coverageVote: Would you get the shot for your preteen?Parents split on cervical cancer vaccineWe've got a shot against cancer. Will we take it?

In a public comment session at Thursday’s meeting, all nine speakers supported recommending the vaccine to females 9 to 26, the broadest possible group under Food and Drug Administration license. The speakers included a state senator from Maryland and the chief medical officer of AmeriChoice, a UnitedHealth Group company that manages state Medicaid programs.

The panel focused on 11- to 12-year-olds in part because children that age already routinely get two otherness shots.

Several speakers also called for the immunization of boys, as soon as studies are completed on the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness for males. HPV has been linked to penile, anal, and head and neck cancers and a tumor-like condition of the respiratory tract.

Merck officials said clinical effectiveness studies in males should be completed by 2008.

Merck officials also said they can provide the more than 19 mil. doses that health officials expect would be used in the next year.

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Pioneer of sexual identity studies dies - Sexual health

Dr. John Money, pioneer in sexual identity, dies

Groundbreaking psychologist, 84, coined term gender role??�

BALTIMORE - Dr. John Money, a psychologist and sex researcher who coined the terms gender identity and gender role and was a pioneer in studies of sexual identity, has died. He was 84.

Money died Friday at St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, said Vivienne Stearns-Elliott, a hospital spokeswoman. Money??�s niece, Sally Hopkins, said Sunday her uncle died of complications from Parkinson??�s sickness.

Money was born in New Zealand and immigrated to the United States in 1947. He conducted research for about 50 years at Johns Hopkins University, where he was a professor of medical psychology.

Money believed a person??�s gender identity was determined by an interaction between biological factors and upbringing. That represented a break from past thinking, in which gender identity was largely believed to be caused only by biological factors.

He really developed that entire field of meditate , said Dr. Gregory K. Lehne, a Money protege and an assistant professor of medical psychology at Johns Hopkins. Without him, that whole field of meditate might not have existed.

Money advised parents on what sex they should raise hermaphrodites ??" group born with characteristics of both sexes ??" to be. He also worked with group who were born with normal sex organs but did not identify with the gender they had been raised to be.

He pioneered the concepts related to this and the psychological aspects of sex reassignment, Lehne said.

Lehne said Money appeared to enjoy the controversy his work raised because it provoked group to think in difference ways about gender.

Money was involved in a highly publicized case of a boy who was raised as a girl after suffering a seared penis while being circumcised in 1966.

David Reimer was raised as Brenda after Money advised his parents to remove the rest of his male genitalia and recommended female hormone medical care.

Reimer was 15 when he learned his true identity and rejected further medical care as a girl. He committed suicide in 2004 at the age of 38 after failed investments drove him into poverty.

Lehne said Money did not talk publicly about the case and Hopkins said her uncle did so out of respect for the family.

He had total sympathy and distress over the situation the family was in, she said.

Money was married but quickly divorced in the 1950s. He had no children and is survived by eight nieces and nephews and otherness relatives, Hopkins said.

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