The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has launched a national campaign to encourage the parents of 11- and 12-year-old girls to vaccinate their daughters against a sexually transmitted disease that causes cervical cancer. Health officials yesterday kicked off the Preteen Vaccine campaign in Los Angeles and in New York City, where the city’s Department of Health, piggybacking on the CDC endorsement for Gardasil, a vaccine against the human papillomavirus made by Merck Co., recommended that children in that age group also be vaccinated against other illnesses, including getting a booster against tetanus, diphtheria, and whooping cough. Those who support mandatory vaccination against HPV for school-age children said the recommendation could pave the way for new legislation.

“I still believe we need to require vaccination as part of school entrance,” Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, a Democrat of Westchester, said.

Ms. Paulin, who sponsored a bill to require such a mandate, speculated that her proposal stalled earlier this year because the $360 vaccination, which was approved for use only last year, is so new. Currently, only Virginia and the District of Columbia have mandated the inoculation.

In New York City, Gardasil has been administered at school-based health centers that are run by hospitals and are not affiliated with the Department of Education. Students who opt for the vaccine have been able to obtain it since November, but education officials said they have not tracked the number of students who received the inoculation, which is administered via three injections over six months.

Overall, the federally funded Vaccines for Children program, city health officials said, had distributed 93,500 doses of Gardasil citywide since it was approved for use.

Yesterday, CDC officials touted the vaccine’s role in preventing HPV, a sexually transmitted disease that affects 1 in 4 women.

“It’s important that we get the word out to parents that the vaccine can protect girls and women against cervical cancer,” the campaign’s manager, Kari Sapsis, said. Meanwhile, city health officials emphasized its other back-to-school recommendations, including two new requirements for school-age children: the tetanus, diphtheria, and whooping cough vaccine, known as DPT, and the chicken pox vaccine.

“All of these vaccines are recommended because they are proven. There is data to show that serious illness can be prevented,” the assistant commissioner for the city’s Bureau of Immunization, Jane Zucker, said. Acknowledging a debate over a mandate for HPV inoculation, she said any such law would have to be a state-level decision.

However, those who oppose mandating the vaccine criticized the CDC campaign.

“I think it’s misguided,” the director of bioethics studies at the Cato Institute, Sigrid Fry-Revere, said. She expressed apprehension over the long-term effects of the drug. “You’re playing guinea pigs with this whole age group of girls,” she said.

Prior to the drug’s approval, other critics called for the vaccine to be banned due to what they characterized as its potential to promote sexual promiscuity.

Despite critics’s objections, many doctors reported a surge in the number of women seeking Gardasil following an aggressive marketing campaign by its manufacturer earlier this year.

“They were coming in here by the busloads,” the director of gynecology at Roosevelt Hospital, Dr. Jacques Moritz, said. Of the CDC campaign, he said, “I think the million-dollar question is going to be, ‘Is this going to be a requirement for entrance into middle schools and high schools. Are they going to be checking this?'”