Controversial cancer preventive comes up for FDA approval: Vaccine protects women from cervical disease, but some say it's unneeded.

Byline: Kathleen Parrish

Jun. 7--Lauren Boulay can always tell when her father has had to deliver a diagnosis of cervical cancer to one of his patients.

His broad shoulders slump as he shuffles through the front door of their stately home, he doesn't have much to say at dinner, and his eyes hold a sadness she can't quite dispel with lighthearted chatter about her day in middle school.

"It's hard on him," said 12-year-old Lauren of her father, Dr. Richard Boulay, chief of gynecologic oncology at Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest.

That's why she's decided to receive Gardasil, a new vaccine against cervical cancer, the second most common cancer in the world, if it's approved by the Food and Drug Administration on Thursday.

"This would help me in the future in case I had a problem," said Lauren, a seventh-grader at Salisbury Middle School who plays soccer and is a flutist in the band.

More than 300,000 women die each year from cervical cancer, including 3,700 in the United States. It's less of a problem in this country because of early detection through Pap tests, but it's the No. 2 cause of cancer deaths in developing countries.

The vaccine, developed by Merck & Co., neutralizes two strains of the human papillomavirus, the most common sexually transmitted disease in the country and one that is contracted by more than 80 percent of all women.

While the immune system generally…