I'm a carrier of a virus that rarely kills anyone on its own but is strongly corelated with a disease that affects millions of people. It's a disease that has been linked to serious developmental problems in children.

I was diagnosed during a routine test while I was pregnant with my daughter. They administered IV antibiotics to me during her delivery to prevent her from acquiring the virus.

Sounds dramatic, doesn't it? Happily, I am only talking about strep.

There are many forms of streptococcal infections. Some cause the strep throat we're all familiar with. Others cause skin rashes, notably on kids' bottoms. (Never mind how I know this.) Strep transmission in childbirth can cause infant blindness.

Strep is also tied to a condition called PANDAS (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections). The National Institutes of Mental Health describe the condition as "a subset of children who have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and/or tic disorders such as Tourette's Syndrome, and in whom symptoms worsen following strep infections such as 'Strep throat' and Scarlet Fever."

Who wouldn't want a vaccine to spare our kids that? Too bad there isn't one.

If you are in your 20's or older, you may remember your parents exposing you to kids with chicken pox so you could catch it too and get the itching and scabbing over with. Why? Well, chicken pox in childhood isn't all that dangerous for most. Chicken pox in adults can be deadly.

Once they developed a chicken pox vaccine, it was a few years before they made it mandatory in Maryland to attend public schools.

I'm curious to know how the number of women who die each year from cervical cancers adds up in comparison to the number of adults who die annually from chicken pox or shingles.

Now brace yourself for some TMI. That Group B streptococcus colony of mine? It does not live in my throat. It lives in my, ahem, birth canal.

It turns out not to be sexually transmitted. But honestly, until I looked it up on the internet to check just now, I'd kind of assumed it was. I mean, how on earth else would it have gotten there?

By the same token, not all Human Papillomavirus (HPV) infections are sexually transmitted or dangerous. But the ones that are sexually transmitted can lead to cancer.

All of my kids, boys and girl alike, are getting their HPV vaccines as they reach the appropriate age to do so.

The public debate on mandating HPV vaccines needs to center around facts about the level of public health risk cervical cancer poses. It shouldn't be about where individual viruses live in the human body or how they got there in the first place.