Gardasil - Side Effects

I just found this warning about the side effects of Gardasil, the vaccine that claims to prevent cervical cancer. Raven does a magnificent job of tearing down the inflated claims about the drug's wonder status.

Roughly 15,000 women a year are DX with cervical cancer.
Many will catch it in it’s early stages where it can be successfully treated. Life expectancy is high for those who take care of themselves. Remember not all these cancers are caused by HPV…and the women who are DX with this have other risk factors present.

Go, read the rest - it's an awesomely comprehensive answer to the scare mongers who want to force all young women to submit to vaccination.

Can someone help me out with the numbers?

I just had a thought - the HPV pushers have been pointing to the INCREDIBLE incidence of HPV in the female population. According to the pro-vaccine people, about 50% of the sexually active population has been exposed.

Naturally, most people reading those stats start sweating. Even if only 1% of the infected population gets cervical cancer, that's a heck of a lot of women who would die.

Right?

Wrong!

I just checked with Wikipedia (yeah, I DO take their information with a grain of salt, but, on basic topics, they're not bad).

ALL WARTS - THE KIND YOU USED TO GET ON YOUR HANDS, PLANTAR WARTS (OCCUR ON THE FOOT - I'VE GOT ONE NOW), AND ALL OTHER TYPES - THE ONES THAT OCCUR ON OLD PEOPLE - ARE CAUSED BY THE SAME HUMAN PAPILLOMA VIRUS!!!!

So, basically, you can ignore MOST, if not virtually ALL, of the hype about the dreaded incidence of HPV, and how the virus will lead to a decimation of the female population, due to cervical cancer.

Without breaking apart the stats into specifically genital-area infection, all the stats are USELESS!

Does anyone have a better breakdown of the numbers?

What's the hurry?

From
The Washington Times

Negative side effects of Gardasil, a new Merck vaccine to prevent the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer, are being reported in the District of Columbia and 20 states, including Virginia. The reactions range from loss of consciousness to seizures.
"Young girls are experiencing severe headaches, dizziness, temporary loss of vision and some girls have lost consciousness during what appear to be seizures," said Vicky Debold, health policy analyst for the National Vaccine Information Center, a nonprofit watchdog organization that was created in the early 1980s to prevent vaccine injuries.
Following federal approval of the vaccine in July 2006, a storm of legislation was introduced across the nation that would make the vaccine mandatory in schools.

The same article is reporting lower stats than other sites – I'm generally reading 11K+ cases of invasive cervical cancer projected for 2007. That's a major jump, especially since the incidence of cervical cancer (US) has been declining for years.

The American Cancer Society estimates there were 9,710 new cases of cervical cancer in the United States in 2006.

I'm particularly unnerved about this:

Merck spokesman Chris Loder said the vaccine is effective for five years and the Whitehouse Station, N.J., drug maker is not sure how long afterward the vaccine will work. Critics point out that an additional booster shot may be necessary.

So, are they suggesting that a booster may be necessary? From my reckoning, it will need to be updated just when the girls are hitting the 16-18 year range – precisely when they are more likely to be having sex.

Therefore, vaccinate them early, because some girls are having sex at ages when their partners could be charged with stat rape. However, at the ages girls are more likely to have consensual sex, the vaccine MAY NOT WORK!

From the Merck site:http://www.merck.com/product/usa/pi_circulars/g/gardasil/gardasil_ppi.pdf

As with all vaccines, GARDASIL may not fully protect everyone who gets the vaccine.

Merck says that, even if previously infected with HPV, women should get the vaccine, since there's no way to know precisely which strain caused the positive response. On the Women to Women site, http://www.womentowomen.com/sexualityandfertility/gardasil-landing.asp
in contrast, they found that

trial subjects who had already had exposure to the four strains showed higher rates of cervical neoplasia (abnormal cancer cell precursors), raising questions as to whether the vaccine impairs immune response under such circumstances, or whether there were demographic factors at play, or both.

The evolutionary issue has to be considered – remember that old maxim, Nature abhors a vacuum?

How long will protection last? Will boosters be needed? Or worse, will elimination of just four out of over 100 viral strains create a niche for other strains to fill? Swimming in its own vast gene pool and with billions of human hosts at hand, HPV has quite a survival advantage. What will happen to the niche currently occupied by strains # 16, 18, 6 and 11, if they are eliminated through vaccination? Microorganisms enjoy an extremely short life-cycle relative to ours, giving them the evolutionary edge when it comes to developing resistance against the very drugs and vaccines (and pesticides) we employ to annihilate them.

Further, I don't entirely agree with adding the 2 strains of genital warts to the package. Wouldn't it have been more useful to protect against the remainder of the HPV strains that are said to be responsible for about 30% of cancers?

Where have all the young men gone? On another note, if our desire to protect women from cervical cancer is genuine, when would such a vaccine be ready for administration to men and, for that matter, when will boys and men be lined up to receive it? Some speculate that the reason protection is afforded against two genital wart strains by the vaccine is not simply because, as the company describes it, the presence of infection from the two strains can be a confounding factor in determining exposure to oncogenic strains, but because men worry most of all about the cosmetic impact of contracting genital warts, so having resistance to warts would lend cachet to having the vaccination.

Yeah, the unsightliness of those warts on the penis does inhibit women from rushing the guys into the sack. You have to look at the warts and say, wow, if he has that, what ELSE does he have?

The American College of Pediatricians opposes forcing HPV vaccination as a requirement for school attendance.

The American College of Pediatricians applauds the availability of HPV vaccine. We strongly oppose requiring students to obtain the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine as a requirement for public school attendance.
HPV is spread only by intercourse. Keeping children out of school because they have not been vaccinated with the HPV vaccine is a serious, precedent-setting action. It replaces parental medical decision-making with government regulation which should be reserved for the improvement of the general public health. HPV cannot innocently be “caught” in a classroom as measles or other vaccine preventable diseases can.

The College also addresses the need for boosters

Waning protection is an issue with almost every vaccine in existence.

From Merck's own site, something new. I know I've not seen this information before

GARDASIL* is a non-infectious recombinant, quadrivalent vaccine

Given many people's reaction to manipulating DNA, I think the public should be aware of this.