Bonnie Diraimondo is an RN and a patient advocate regarding HPV issues. She is an international speaker, author,and freelance writer who maintains her own website (certified to provide medically accurate information) and blog to provide up-to-date information on all aspects of HPV.
Her book, Any Mother's Daughter - One Woman's Lifelong Struggle With HPV, is endorsed and the foreword written by Nobel Prize recipient in medicine, Prof. Harald zur Hausen, MD for his work in HPV research and discovery that HPV is responsible for cervical cancer. Not only has he recommended the book for anyone wishing to become informed regarding HPV, but for practicing physicians as well.
Bonnie became a registered nurse in 1983. In 1987, she was diagnosed with HPV. Within four short years, the virus had affected her cervix, vagina, and vulva. In 1991, when her daughter was only six weeks old, she was diagnosed with invasive squamous cell cancer of the anus. This required surgical resection, chemo and radiation therapy. A survivor of that cancer, she unfortunately developed a recurrence in 2008 which she has also survived.
"It was discouraging, that after more than two decades many women still knew very little about HPV in addition to the informational gap of those in the healthcare field. In attempt to fill this gap, I have developed a website (thehpvsupportnetwork.org) and blog, and have written "Any Mother's Daughter" a book which will provide great insight into HPV, its origin, diagnosis and various treatments."
The site is certified regarding accurate medical information on the internet to assure those who visit of the validity of the documenation and information listed there. Hopefully this will be a valuable resource for women (especially the newly diagnosed), men and healthcare providers.
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Hello. My name is Saraya Diraimondo. I am Bonnie Diraimondo's daughter. I wanted to inform anyone from this site that she helped or talked to that she passed away last Thursday, March 1. It was a ...
March 9, 2012 - 4:51pm
When Merck Pharmaceuticals received approval from the FDA for the Gardasil vaccine in 2006, it was for the protection against four strains of HPV and is therefore referred to as quadrivalent. ...
February 29, 2012 - 9:04am
Now that I have raised the ire of anyone who now has cervical cancer, or has survived, or has lost a loved one to this disease, let me delve further into the importance of ending the focus on ...
February 26, 2012 - 7:00pm
It is never easy to lose someone to death, even if you have been prepared for it in advance. Having lost one parent quickly to a heart attack and another parent to a long-term cancer I have ...
February 21, 2012 - 10:02pm
On February 5, 2012, the world lost a truly courageous soul, that of Michele Baldwin. At age 45, she had suffered from cervical cancer, the result of HPV (human papillomavirus).
Baldwin ...
February 19, 2012 - 10:45pm
Erythema nodosum is a very painful condition of the skin, typically the lower legs, and is more common in women than in men.
It presents with an outcropping of nodules beneath the skin and is ...
February 15, 2012 - 3:35am
I was surprised to learn that 70 percent of the immune system receptors are located within the gut or intestine, and that the permeability of the gut plays a significant part in a variety of ...
February 13, 2012 - 6:04am
In my earlier article, The Ultimate Controversy: Will HPV Go Away on Its Own? I talked about this controversial question.
The answer you receive from a health care professional may be yes, but ...
February 7, 2012 - 9:46pm
One of the reasons that the question still persists regarding whether or not HPV goes away on its own is that the answer is both yes, and no. Each of these answers depends upon numerous factors ...
February 6, 2012 - 3:23pm
Many teens concerned about maintaining their virginity are turning to oral and anal sex instead. What they often fail to understand is that these sexual alternatives can carry just as high a risk ...
February 1, 2012 - 10:00am
Everyone knows, whether they deal with it directly or not, that the cost of medical coverage including medications has gone through the roof. For those individuals on Medicare, resulting either ...
January 30, 2012 - 6:11am
As parents, of course we want to know that the necessary steps have been taken to show that any vaccine, not just HPV, has been evaluated with respect to the costs benefit analysis of receiving ...
January 25, 2012 - 2:10pm
Despite being selected by the National Cancer Institute as one of the most successful investments for developing innovative products to fight cancer, the FDA, as anticipated by this author, denied ...
January 22, 2012 - 7:27pm
The FDA has informed Guided Therapeutics that it expects to rule by January 20, 2012 on its application for pre-market approval. Guided Therapeutics are makers of the LuViva device which can ...
January 18, 2012 - 6:47am
I spoke with a friend of mine the other day. Her son of 35 was diagnosed with colon cancer a short time ago. Not only that, but they also found three lesions in his liver indicating that the ...
January 16, 2012 - 7:34am
Dr. Jimmie Holland, author and renowned psychiatrist, and her husband Dr. Billie Holland, a cancer specialist often had conversations regarding his work during the early 1970s to which she would ...
January 11, 2012 - 1:58pm
For more than three years now, I have been working as a patient advocate for those with HPV-related conditions. During that time I have heard the stories of dozens of women (and men) whose ...
January 9, 2012 - 10:17am
Photodynamic therapy or PDT is a fairly new form of treatment used to treat various forms of cancer. The treatment involves utilizing various photosensitizing agents along with differing ...
January 4, 2012 - 5:49am
Recent research, which took place over a period of 14 years and utilized two irrefutable government sources for its statistical information, was presented at the 2011 annual meeting of The ...
January 3, 2012 - 10:28am
It’s long past time for the specialty of colorectal surgeons and even gastroenterologists to come up to current standards when it comes to dealing with anal cancer.
Bleeding hemorrhoids is more ...
December 28, 2011 - 11:46am
I had the unfortunate experience of having to spend Christmas night in the Emergency Room with concerns regarding numerous lumps I had found in my calves. ...
December 26, 2011 - 10:02am
In a recent study conducted by Dr. Hsu-Ko Kuo and Dr. Ken Fujise from the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, showed that women infected with HPV were at higher risk for heart attacks ...
December 21, 2011 - 7:43am
I know I have often seen movies or television shows in which usually somewhat older children, perhaps in their twenties, are somehow reminded of the fact that their parents are still sexually ...
December 19, 2011 - 2:05pm
In the short time since my previous article about the new cervical screening device LuViva, Health Canada has approved the use of Guided Therapeutics new device for such screening. While the FDA ...
December 14, 2011 - 12:11pm
According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI) it has designated the LuViva(TM) Advanced Cervical Scan by Guided Therapeutics, Inc. as one of the agency's greatest investments success stories. ...
December 12, 2011 - 12:18am
There has been an increased amount of reporting lately across a variety of news media from radio to print articles involving HPV. Women are willing to speak up about the virus, the knowledge of ...
December 7, 2011 - 6:43am
In this month's Vogue magazine, Ayelet Waldman, noted author and wife of Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon, described her conversation with her children’s pediatrician regarding the HPV ...
December 5, 2011 - 2:02pm
Several weeks ago, the ACIP (Advisory Committee on Immunization Practice) finally changed their position on the HPV vaccine use for boys and young men from allowed to recommended. This after ...
November 30, 2011 - 1:37pm
In a recent interview with XO Jane of Sirius radio, Alexa Ray Joel, daughter of the famous singer Billy Joel and supermodel mom in her own right Christie Brinkley, exposed the fact that she had ...
November 28, 2011 - 12:11pm
I have previously written about the long term use of medications such as Nasonex for allergies and the potential effects this may have on a patient with HPV. Nasonex is a corticosteroid and any ...
November 23, 2011 - 11:50am
With the holidays fast approaching, this is usually the time of year that people not only open their hearts, but their minds as well. There appears to be a greater sense of human compassion and ...
November 21, 2011 - 11:53pm
Individuals reading about the human papillomavirus and the HPV vaccine will most likely come across comments pertaining to HPV genotyping. So just what is HPV genotyping and how can it be ...
November 16, 2011 - 1:06pm
It is never easy to lose someone to death, even if you have been prepared for it in advance. Having lost one parent quickly to a heart attack and another parent to a long-term cancer I have ...
Bonnie Diraimondo RN commented on Bonnie Diraimondo RN's post When Disease is Preventable