Yet more side effects from Gardasil

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/02/06/eveningnews/main4781658.shtml

New Worries About Gardasil Safety

CBS Evening News Exclusive: Vaccine-Safety Group Study Shows Higher Instance Of Medical Side-Effects Than Another Vaccine

WASHINGTON, Feb. 6, 2009 | by Sharyl Attkisson

Gabby Swank was a straight-A student and cheerleader.

But that was before she became very ill following the standard dose of three Gardasil vaccinations, Attkisson reports.

You know the commercial. It showed teenage girls saying "I want to be one less" who gets the HPV virus, which is linked to cervical cancer.

"It was like a big hype among my friends, because we're like, 'we're gonna get it' because we felt almost pressured by the commercials," Gabby said.

Gabby got sicker after each shot, progressing to seizures, strokes and heart problems. It was her neurologist who suspected Gardasil was to blame.

"I think there are too many people having serious long-term side-effects," said neurologist Dr. Dwight Lindholm.

Last fall, the government and vaccine maker Merck concluded there's no link between Gardasil and serious adverse events like Gabby's. But a new analysis calls that finding into question.

The National Vaccine Information Center (http://www.nvic.org/), a private vaccine-safety group, compared Gardasil adverse events to another vaccine, one also given to young people, but for meningitis. Gardasil had three times the number of Emergency Room visits - more than 5,000. Reports of side effects were up to 30 times higher with Gardasil.

http://wwwimage.cbsnews.com/common/images/bug_pdf.gif Read the analysis by the National Vaccine Information Center. (http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/NVICGardasilvsMenactraVAERSReportFeb2009.pdf) "If I'd have known, we never would have gotten the shot," said Emily Tarsell, whose daughter, Chris, died three weeks after her third Gardasil shot. She was one of the 29 fatalities reported in two years. "And she'd be here to hug."

Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder of the NVIC, said: "Now we know from this report that there are more reactions and deaths associated with Gardasil than with another vaccine given in the same age group. It's irresponsible not to take action."

Merck, the FDA and CDC question the value of the new analysis, say they continue to review the data, Gardasil remains safe and effective, and its benefits outweigh the risks.

Those who believe the vaccine hurt them aren't convinced. Gabby isn't cheering anymore and is too sick to even attend school.

"I struggle with guilt a lot, because I made the choice to get the shot for her," said Gabby's mom, Shannon Swank.

Meantime, Merck has asked the FDA to approve it for boys (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/01/06/health/main4703200.shtml), who can pass on the cancer causing virus to girls, meaning the number of people getting Gardasil may double


What follows is a statement from Merck:

It's important to remember that the proven benefit of GARDASIL is that it helps prevent cervical cancer caused by the two virus types responsible for most cases of cervical cancer. Nothing is more important to Merck than the safety of our products and we carefully monitor the safety of GARDASIL on a routine basis. Experts at the FDA and CDC also continue to review data and, as recently as four months ago, said "GARDASIL continues to be safe and effective, and its benefits continue to outweigh its risks."

NVIC is not a medical organization and has a long history of raising concerns about vaccines that are in direct conflict with the opinion of leading medical experts. We encourage consumers to get reliable information about the safety of vaccines from www.cdc.gov.<

[MinorityView]

So it isn't okay to raise concerns about vaccines if those concerns are in direct conflict with the OPINION of leading medical experts?

What ever happened to basing medical safety on science?

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

well, as you know MV, anyone who isn't a doctor couldn't possibly know anything, and alleging their child has a reaction is simply in the realms of fantasy.

:ride:

[MinorityView]

Oh, yes, of course. The MD as the direct representative of Gd ploy.

Forgot about that detail.

[cartersmom]

well, as you know MV, anyone who isn't a doctor couldn't possibly know anything, and alleging their child has a reaction is simply in the realms of fantasy.

:ride:

Yet it seems in the rare event that a MD actually speaks out against a vaccine or acknowledges they have serious side effects they are treated like a heretic. Isn't that a bit hypocritical? They won't listen to non MD's because they couldn't possible know anything, but thay won't listen to any MD's that dare to have a differing opinion and God forbid that MD actually presents scientific research to back up their claims....that is just flat out ignored. Isn't it really a no win situation??

[Spy]

So it isn't okay to raise concerns about vaccines if those concerns are in direct conflict with the OPINION of leading medical experts?

What ever happened to basing medical safety on science?

There is no science when it comes to medical safety. :rolleyes: Or, should we say, medical OPINION is the one and only ultimate 'science'. :D

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

Oh, yes, of course. The MD as the direct representative of Gd ploy.

Forgot about that detail.

Big detail. Small g please. Only a defective god could have such a ploy... :cool:

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

Yet it seems in the rare event that a MD actually speaks out against a vaccine or acknowledges they have serious side effects they are treated like a heretic. Isn't that a bit hypocritical? They won't listen to non MD's because they couldn't possible know anything, but thay won't listen to any MD's that dare to have a differing opinion and God forbid that MD actually presents scientific research to back up their claims....that is just flat out ignored. Isn't it really a no win situation??

Ah yes, but the dice for being legally treated like that was set back in 1880, when all the cancer specialists (a new breed) came out against the smallpox vaccine, saying that it was responsible for a huge surge in cancer. That was poo pooed, of course (though catagorically proven later, and I have the medical articles to prove it...) Then, worse was to come. When they starting using the diphtheria toxin anti-toxin, these same cancer specialists started to say, "Isn't this interesting. Whereas cancer was primarily found on the skin before, now we are finding a whole lot more inside the body!") Before that, the medical profession just used the strong arm tactics of "shunning" and declaring "unclean" and putting rebels in lunatic assylums... Now, with internet, radio, TV, and a generation who tend to assimilate as fact, short text messaging.... the world is their oyster.

Such lunacy, like medical heresy backed with fact, must be stopped you know. Heretics had not been silenced effectively, prior to 1895, and could still practice medicine..., so new measures has to be taken. Enter a new organisation designed for just such a purpose...the General Medical Council was established, with the specific purpose of keeping doctors in line, and shutting up dissenters. it continues in that role today, whenever it is given the opportunity. However, it can fail, particularly if the doctor concerned has dotted the I's and crossed the T's and has lawyers who READ everything required and "get" the issues. Jayne Donegan comes to mind.

But they are capable of anything. They deregistered a doctor years ago, for preaching that eating wholemeal bread would cure quite a few ills caused by the bad habit of eating white bread. I think Hovis was his name? No is wasn't... but it was something like that anyway...

Not that shutting up dissenters started at the end of the 1800s. After William Harvey published his treatise on the blood circulation of the body, he too was smacked repeatedly over the head. His UK contemporaries thought him a lunatic. And the Americans had perfected that as an art form too, by pillorying and slandering Dr Oliver Wendell Holmes from around 1930 something onward..., and Europe followed suit with Semmelweis.

My books on the History of Medicine, are all you need to see where the current oligarchial dictatorship from-the-top trends come from.

Some will scoff and say, "Ah, but WE live in an information age: an age of foresight, understanding, democracy and common sense, and we left all that medieval snittery behind."

*snort*

[MinorityView]

*snort*

I couldn't have put it better meself--most eloquent summing up--thank you.

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2009/feb/02/chronically-ill-girl-eyes-vaccine/

Chronically ill girl eyes vaccine

Despite reports, maker, agencies defend Gardasil

By Judi Villa (http://www.rockymountainnews.com/staff/judi-villa/), Rocky Mountain News

Published February 2, 2009 at 12:05 a.m.

Text size http://denver.rockymountainnews.com/images/icons/text-increase.gif http://denver.rockymountainnews.com/images/icons/text-decrease.gif

21 Comments (http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2009/feb/02/chronically-ill-girl-eyes-vaccine/#comments)
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http://media.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/content/img/photos/2009/02/01/437483016_t220.jpg (http://www.rockymountainnews.com/photos/2009/feb/01/122382/) Photo by Linda McConnell / Special To The Rocky
Ashley Ryburn, 16, sits with her mother, Lisa Holtman, at their home in Arvada. Until a year ago, Ashley was an active, healthy teenager. Since receiving the Gardasil vaccine to prevent cervical cancer, however, Ashley has suffered seizures, headaches, nausea, dizziness and paralysis.


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Suddenly, Ashley Ryburn was sick all the time, and her mother didn't understand why.
Ashley, 16, played four sports, danced in her high school's show choir and earned top grades without even trying.

But now, Ashley was exhausted all the time. She was nauseated. She passed out at show choir and blacked out at school.

And then one day Ashley's legs went numb. She couldn't walk.

"You see somebody touch your legs and you can't feel it," Ashley recalled. "That's the scariest thing in the world."

For a year this has gone on: four episodes of temporary paralysis. Back spasms so painful Ashley would tell her mom "bye" and stop breathing. Hospitalizations. More 911 calls than Ashley can count. Trip after trip to doctors who couldn't seem to find anything wrong.

"I've heard so many times I'm crazy, I'm bulimic, I'm on drugs," Ashley said. "It's not your first thought that it's a vaccine."

A vaccine? Lisa Holtman is convinced that's what turned her perfectly healthy daughter into a chronically ill teenager.

In August and October 2007, Ashley was given doses of Gardasil, a vaccine recommended for adolescent girls to prevent cervical cancer. Her first Gardasil shot was given in conjunction with a meningitis vaccine.

The combination is said to be safe - and is commonly administered - but Gardasil was never clinically tested with the meningitis vaccine.

Research from the National Vaccine Information Center indicates reactions to Gardasil increase when it is given with the meningitis shot. But Neal Halsey, director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, said general guidelines allow for two or three inactivated vaccines, such as the HPV and meningitis vaccines, to be given at the same time without expecting increased rates of adverse reactions.

The meningitis vaccine was not available when Gardasil began clinical testing, so the Food and Drug Administration agreed to test it post-licensure, Halsey said.
Results of those tests are expected to be released soon.

"There is no reason that I know of that there may be an increased risk of any serious complications associated with the simultaneous administration of these two inactive or killed vaccines," Halsey said in a recent interview.

Ashley didn't receive any other shots with her second dose of Gardasil. It was a month or so after the second Gardasil vaccine that she started getting sick.

"She didn't go to the doctor at all, then after she got the shots, it's boom, boom, boom," Holtman said. "We haven't stopped."

Across the country, there are reports of girls like Ashley becoming chronically ill, and even dying, after being vaccinated with Gardasil - raising questions about whether the vaccine is indeed safe and if there has been enough testing done on its side effects.

Gardasil, manufactured by Merck and Co., was licensed in 2006 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Merck both say the vaccination is safe. So does Dr. Judith Shlay, director of the immunization and travel clinic at Denver Health Medical Center.

Shlay says Denver Health administers thousands of vaccines each year, including Gardasil, and rarely has any problems. The biggest issue with Gardasil was reports of adolescent girls fainting, but Shlay said Denver Health devised a protocol that involved monitoring teens before they left and that has alleviated the concern.
"It's considered a very safe vaccine," Shlay said. "We haven't seen people get sick from it."

As of Aug. 31, the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) had logged 10,326 reports of reactions to Gardasil, according to the CDC. Of those reports, 94 percent were considered to be "nonserious."

The serious reports included Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare disorder that causes muscle weakness, blood clots and death. Each incident was "carefully analyzed by medical experts," the CDC said in a report last updated in October.

"Experts have not found a common medical pattern to the reports of serious adverse events reported for Gardasil that would suggest that they were caused by the vaccine," the CDC said.

'No safety issue'

Merck issued its own statement in July, saying it was "proud of the public health benefit that Gardasil can provide in helping to prevent cervical cancer" and maintaining that "no safety issue related to the vaccine has been identified."

Still, in 2007 and 2008, Gardasil accounted for about 20 percent of reactions reported to VAERS, said Barbara Loe Fisher, co- founder and president of the National Vaccine Information Center, a watchdog group in Virginia.

Fisher calls the percentage "unusual" given that Gardasil is new and isn't mandated.
"This is a whitewash of this vaccine. To say that almost 10,000 reports of reactions, injuries, 30 deaths is all a coincidence is simply not scientifically responsible," Fisher said. "You have perfectly healthy girls go in and get this shot and then suffer a pattern, a very clear pattern of injury, and some of them are dying. This is not acceptable."

The side effects all look a lot like what's been happening to Ashley, Fisher said: brain inflammation, immune system dysfunction, tingling and numbness in the hands, feet and legs, severe headaches, strokes, joint pain, muscle weakness, seizures and memory loss.

"Usually, these girls are very high functioning," Fisher said. "They're honor roll students. They're athletes. They're usually in extremely good health before they have a severe downward turn after receiving one or more Gardasil vaccinations."

But Halsey, of the Institute for Vaccine Safety, said people need to be "very careful not to jump on the bandwagon" that vaccines caused illness. Such allegations have surfaced before only to be disproved in resulting studies.

Serious allergic reactions to the HPV vaccine are rare, about one in a million, ( :chair: ~ Hilary) putting them in "the same ballpark" as any other vaccine, Halsey said.

"The evidence does not support a causal relationship," he said. "It's much more likely to be coincidental."

Can't go back

Still, Ashley's life looks nothing like it did before Gardasil. Her days consist mostly of going to school, coming home and sleeping. Her hair falls out in clumps. Her nausea is ever present. Her blood pressure drops dangerously low. She can't breathe.

Ashley looks back on pictures of summer camp just before she received the first Gardasil shot. She is saddling horses, hoisting a counselor for fun and leg wrestling.
"It hurts to know that if I went back to that day in my health now, I couldn't do it," Ashley said. "I can't do those things anymore."

Ashley received her vaccinations in Iowa before she and her mother moved to Arvada. It was recommended during a routine physical. Since then, Ashley has had to quit sports and her grades have slipped from A's and B's to B's and C's. Most of the time, she can't remember what she's read from one day to the next.

When she tried out for basketball at her high school this year, her legs were shaking and she couldn't breathe after two drills. Ashley cried.

She takes a handful of pills every day and has to carry a special bag of medical supplies in case she has an "episode."

Even when Ashley has good days, she knows the twitches in her back and the funny feeling in the back of her head will always come back, signaling another episode. Her blood pressure will plummet. She will hear her mother or her boyfriend talking to her, but she won't be able to answer. She will have trouble breathing and she will pass out.

"If I had never got the shot, I would be a normal teenager," Ashley said. "I wish I could go back."


Genital human papillomavirus (HPV)

* Most common sexually transmitted virus in the United States

* At least half of sexually active people will have it at some point in their lives, accodring to CDC estimates. There often are no symptoms, and it usually goes away on its own without causing any serious health problems.

IMMUNIZATION

* Three shots over six months

* It protects against four strains of HPV, which are responsible for 70 percent of cervical cancers and 90 percent of genital warts. It is recommended for girls as young as 9.

* Several states, including Colorado, have introduced legislation mandating the vaccine for girls entering the sixth grade. Only Washington, D.C., and Virginia have passed the mandates, to take effect in 2009 and 2010, respectively.

* Colorado has had no reports of serious reactions to the vaccine, according to Joni Reynolds, immunization program director for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

* The Institute of Medicine is about to convene a two-year study of injuries and deaths related to four vaccines, including HPV.

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

Read the comments!!!! :hide:

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4781857nSource

[MinorityView]

I read the comments. It is going to be hard to shut all these parents up, isn't it. How awful that these young women are having their lives destroyed to keep Merck's profits clicking along.

Damn!

[cartersmom]

I just read the comments...so sad. all those girls suffering

I thought it was interesting how that 1 lady who claimed to have cervical cancer and spoke out FOR the vaccine never returned to defend her opinion when everyone bascially accused her of being a drug rep!

[Sakura]

I don't see any comments, did they pull them?

[cartersmom]

I don't see any comments, did they pull them?


No...go to the body of what MT posted and towarsd the top it says 21 comments..click on that

[MinorityView]

A of A has an announcement that there were two girls hospitalized following Gardasil in Spain and they PULLED the vaccine.

[Momtezuma Tuatara]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090210/hl_afp/spainhealthcancervaccine

Spain withdraws cervical cancer shot after illnesses

MADRID (AFP) – Spanish health authorities have withdrawn tens of thousands of doses of a vaccine against cervical cancer after two teenagers who received the shots were hospitalised, regional authorities said on Tuesday.

A batch of nearly 76,000 doses of the human papillomavirus vaccine HPV was withdrawn from market, a government statement said, after two girls in the eastern Valencia region fell seriously ill hours after receiving them.

"One of the girls got out of intensive care this weekend and the other is still there. Both are in stable condition," a Valencia health department spokeswoman told AFP.
The two girls were vaccinated last week as part of a vast government vaccination programme targeting adolescents.

The vaccine prevents the most common types of HPV, a common virus spread through sexual contact that can cause cervical cancer.

Some 500,000 cases of cervical cancer are discovered each year, according to United Nations estimates, many in developing countries. If left untreated, invasive cervical cancer is almost always fatal.

Spanish health authorities said in a statement the batch of the Gardasil brand of vaccines was distributed country-wide, with some earmarked for regional vaccination programs and the rest sold at pharmacies.

The vaccine has been available for girls since 2006, ideally before their first sexual encounter.

Sweden recently announced it would offer the vaccines to all primary school girls free of charge as of 2010

Tue Feb 10, 10:05 am ET