The controversy surrounding the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination and a link to chronic symptoms in girls and young women seems set to run and run, despite a recent review by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) dismissing this claim. Offered to teenage girls in Ireland since May 2010 as part of the school’s vaccination programme, it is recommended by the World Health Organisation.
By Claire Corrigan
However for a growing number of Irish teenagers and worried parents, the serious symptoms which the teenagers experienced after receiving the vaccine, these claims are not convincing. And Topic has met some of the parents and teenagers, and knows of other cases.
One Mullingar mother, who has serious doubts about the EMA’s findings, is Caroline Delaney who lives in Ardleigh. Her previously sporty, energetic and outgoing daughter Shannon became seriously and unexplainably ill, 16 days after receiving the vaccine, on 4 April, 2012.
“One morning, she fainted three times while trying to get from her bedroom to the bathroom,” Ms. Delaney told Topic. “I’m with a support group called Reaction and Effects of Gardasil Resulting in Extreme Trauma (REGRET), and only for them, we’d be lost. Shannon knows that she’s not alone and that other girls out there are going through the same thing.”
Despite being admitted to hospital numerous times over the past two years and undergoing a number of tests, including MRIs, CT scans, eye scans and a lumbar puncture, doctors have so far not identified the reason for the Community School student’s debilitating symptoms.
Shannon told Topic, “I was really sporty. I loved football, running, tennis swimming, TaeKwan-Do and anything else I could get to. I was really confident and talked to anyone. I was happy really. Now I can’t even do 30 minutes of PE in school any more. I’m at home constantly and falling asleep all the time. I have nightmares and wake up with hallucinations, and the panic attacks and anxiety are also really bad. The only thing that helped me a little bit was when I found the support group and I saw that all the girls had the exact same symptoms as me.”
Talking about her daughter’s symptoms, Ms. Delany said, “She has difficulty breathing, confusion, aching muscles, muscle weakness, swollen glands in her neck, weakness, chills and her nails and lips regularly turn blue. We went to the doctor and he said it was a lack of oxygen to the blood and she never ever had anything like that before.”
WORRIES ABOUT
LEAVING CERT
Shannon says that her biggest fear is that the illness will affect her performance in the Leaving Cert. “My big worry is the memory loss, because I’m trying to do my Leaving Cert. I want to do Childcare or Nursing in college. I feel like it has got very slowly worse, so I’m just hoping it doesn’t get any worse before then, so I do okay. I try to take down all the notes but because my vision is blurry, it’s hard to see sometimes.”
Ms. Delaney said that she can’t help but worry about her daughter’s future.
“I know they can say that out of 100 per cent, only a certain percentage are affected, but what about that percentage? Will she need care for the rest of her life? Will she hold down a full-time job? Will she be able to go college or drive a car? I am not anti-vaccine and I actually recently got the swine flu injection. I’m anti-Gardasil because of the effects it has had on Shannon and the many other girls across the country who all have near identical symptoms.”
14 YEAR OLD’S STORY
Shauna Cooney, 14, from Edenderry, Co. Offaly, tells a similar story. Described by her mother, Sharon, as a happy-go-lucky teenager who was looking forward to going into 1st year, she too became seriously ill within months of receiving the vaccine.
Ms. Cooney told Topic, “Shauna has episodes where her leg becomes completely cold to the touch and so painful, she is unable to put any weight on it. This can last for up to a week. Whenever she is in any kind of severe type of pain, it seems to bring on the seizures which can happen at any time – she could be sitting here talking to me and the next minute she will be on the floor.”
Shauna was staying at her grandmother’s house when she first began to feel unwell. “I got a call saying that she had thrown up and she was disorientated and had fallen. She was brought to Temple Street who classed the incident as a faint,” Ms. Cooney said.
A month later, the family were walking through IKEA when Shauna began to feel ill and when leaving, she fell on the floor. She was brought into Temple Street again and discharged after a couple of hours. We went to the paediatric doctor in Mullingar and she was referred to the neurology department.”
The teenager then began to have episodes every second or third day, averaging from 30 seconds to six minutes. “It’s very worrying because if she had one while standing at the top of the stairs, she could be badly injured. She once collapsed in the bathroom and hit her head off the side of the bath, so the ambulance had to be called. She was walking to school the other day and fell, but her friends managed to catch her before she hit the kerb. She’s 14 and she can’t even go for a walk by herself.”
One particularly severe incident lasted 40 minutes and resulted in the first responder having to administer a dose of Midazolam Buccal through the nasal passage directly into Shauna’s brain.
Ms. Cooney said that the illness has impacted heavily on both her daughter and the rest of the family’s lives. “She gets frustrated because she’s missed enough school as it and she doesn’t want to miss any more. There’s times when she’s just talking to us and her face goes completely white. She either becomes very stiff and rigid and you can’t move her or she collapses. It’s heartbreaking because her life is put on hold and her family life is being put on hold because she doesn’t know when these bad episodes are going to happen. We know that there is a problem and we just want to get answers. We want to be able to say, ‘Okay, well this is the problem and we can now go about trying to get it rectified.’”
SHAUNA’S STORY
The youngster, who used to engage regularly in activities such as boxing, dancing and drama, told Topic.,“It’s over a hundred girls getting the exact same thing after the same injection. So many girls are having to go through this in their teenage years, and it is hard to study if all you want to do is sleep. I really hope that if the symptoms are from getting the injection that they subside, so I can get on with my life and get on with school. I don’t want to go back to how it was in first year.”
Ms. Cooney said: “I feel like we’re going around in circles. All I want is for someone to admit that there is a problem and that they are going to try and rectify it to make these girls’ lives better. If I’d known then what I know now, I would never have let her get that vaccine.”
A spokesperson for the HSE told Topic, “Gardasil has been tried and tested in large clinical studies which lasted more than a decade and which included over 25,000 subjects in 33 countries. Gardasil is considered safe and well tolerated. The most frequently reported side effects are local redness and/or swelling at the point of injection, and fever. Fainting has occurred after vaccination with Gardasil, especially in adolescents.