Using NewsHour Extra Feature Stories

Overview: NewsHour Extra feature stories can help students identify and interpret key issues in current events. This activity anticipates one class period, but the follow-up essay might be assigned as homework or in another period.

Warm Up: Use initiating questions to introduce the topic and find out how much your students know.

Main Activity: Have students read NewsHour Extra's feature story and answer the questions on the reading comprehension handout.

Discussion: Use discussion questions to encourage students to think about how the issues outlined in the story affect their lives and express and debate different opinions.

Follow-up: Students can write a 500-word editorial on the topic expressing their views and send it to NewsHour Extra [extra@newshour.org] for possible publication.

Evaluation: Students are graded on their answers to reading comprehension questions and/or their editorial.

Story: New Vaccine for Girls Prevents Cervical Cancer, 07/03/06
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/july-dec06/vaccine_7-03.html

Initiating Questions:

1. What is a vaccine?

2. How do vaccines prevent disease?

3. Is there a vaccine for cancer?

Reading Comprehension Questions: (click here for printout)

1. What is Gardasil?

The new vaccine, Gardasil, protects against four strains of the human papillomavirus, the most common sexually transmitted disease.

2. What is cervical cancer?

An estimated half of all women have been exposed to the virus, which, for unknown reasons can cause cancer of the cervix, the narrow part of the uterus just above the vagina.

Over 9,000 women in the United States contract cervical cancer each year and about 3,700 die.

3. Why do more poor women die of cervical cancer?

Pre-cancerous changes in the cervix can be detected by a Pap smear test, but many poor women or women without health insurance don't get the test every year as recommended.

4. How does the vaccine work?

The vaccine, created by the drug company Merck, is made up of virus-like particles that trigger a woman's immune system to react as if she's been infected. The immune reaction prevents the changes in the cervix and can eventually develop into cancer.

5. Who should get the vaccine?

The U.S. Health Department has created a "catch-up" campaign focusing on girls from 13 to 18. Going forward, it will seek to vaccinate all 11 and 12 year olds routinely.

6. Why are some conservative and religious groups opposed to mandatory vaccination?

There are also concerns among some conservative and religious groups that the vaccine will encourage girls to have sex because it prevents a sexually transmitted disease. "You can't catch the virus, you have to go out and get it with sexual behavior," said Linda Klepacki of Focus on the Family, a conservative Christian group based in Colorado Springs, in The New York Times. "We can prevent it by having the best public health method, and that's not having sex before marriage."

Discussion Activity (more research might be needed):

1. Do you think everyone should have the Gardasil vaccine before they can go to school? Why or why not?

2. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has over $60 billion, has expressed interest in funding a vaccination program in poor countries. This foundation is currently working to treat HIV-AIDS and Malaria. Do you think cervical cancer is as important? Why or why not? If you were in charge of the foundation, how would you decide which diseases to focus on?

3. Investigate programs in the United States that try to help people who can't afford health insurance. Are these programs effective? What changes, if any, would you make?

Write a 300-500 word essay on any of these topics providing clear examples. Send your completed editorial to NewsHour Extra (extra@newshour.org). Exceptional essays might be published on our Web site.