Word: gardasil
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...some ways humorous, children being injured every year by vaccinations is not [Sept. 28]. Conventional wisdom, which is what he reports believing in, is not always right. Fifty years of body casts instead of physical therapy for polio victims, thalidomide and its results and the recent speedy rollout of Gardasil - which has already been linked to an estimated 50 deaths - are a testament that the best medical evidence is not always correct. Lynda Lambert, BALTIMORE...
...Morton died after receiving GlaxoSmithKline's Cervarix, one of two vaccines designed to protect women from the human papillomavirus (HPV), a sexually transmitted infection linked to most cervical cancers. (American women receive Gardasil, an HPV vaccine manufactured by Merck.) Introduced last year, Cervarix is expected to cut deaths from cervical cancer in Britain by about 75% - or 650 deaths a year. So far, the vaccine has been given to 1.4 million women in Britain, and Morton's death is the first to be possibly linked to the shot. But there have also been less serious side effects in recipients. Britain...
That should be reassuring. But the study did find that users of Gardasil faint and develop blood clots more often than those receiving other shots. The clots are extremely rare, though. In about 90% of these cases, the girls may have been more vulnerable to developing clots because they smoked or were overweight or on birth control pills. "Was it that this age group also tends to have these risk factors or did the vaccine have some sort of role?" asks the CDC's Dr. Barbara Slade, lead author of the paper. "We really don't know." (See more about...
...Charlotte Haug, editor in chief of the Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association and author of an editorial that JAMA published alongside Slade's paper, cervical cancer can be effectively picked up with Pap smears, a routine part of regular gynecological exams, and it's not clear that adding Gardasil to those screenings would significantly reduce a woman's chance of developing the disease...
Meanwhile, public health experts at Columbia University have a new study that shines a light on the marketing of Gardasil. They say Merck may be indirectly influencing doctors to use the vaccine by providing grants to professional medical organizations which then train and pay physicians to speak about the benefits of HPV vaccination. Merck denies the allegations. "The material developed by these societies is done independent of Merck and without any influence or review from Merck," says Dr. Richard Haupt, who heads the company's HPV-vaccine program. (Read "Selling Gardasil at the Movies...