The Sunday Times
October 4, 2009
What has cervical cancer drug done to our girls?
After one child’s death, we talk to parents who blame the vaccination for
serious illnesses in their daughters
Daniel Foggo, Rosie Millard
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article6860078.ece
Clare Ramagge says her daughter Rebecca has
suffered from chronic fatigue since having the jab;
she is among pafrents taking legal action against
its maker
A year ago Rebecca Ramagge was a happy, sporty teenager, a high achiever at
school and a tournament-level tennis player. Today she’s a 13-year-old crippled
with chronic fatigue syndrome who has been laid up in bed for seven months and
needs her mother’s help to tackle such basic tasks as brushing her hair and
getting dressed.
Last September Rebecca, along with the rest of the girls in her class at St
Bede’s school in Redhill, Surrey, received the first of three inoculations of
Cervarix, the cervical cancer vaccine. As part of a nationwide programme the jab
is being offered to every girl in the UK aged 12 to 13 to try to prevent the
spread of the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, which is linked to most
cases of cervical cancer. By 2011 every girl under 18 will have been offered the
jab.
A few days later Rebecca “had quite severe joint pains”, says her mother Clare
who, with her husband John, runs a car sales business in Reigate. “We took her
to see doctors, who asked me if anything different had happened in her life. The
only thing that had changed was that she had had the jab.”
After a second inoculation in November she felt worse and by March she was on
crutches. Nevertheless, she was given a third dose that month. Within hours she
was “extremely ill”, says Clare: “She hasn’t been to school for seven months. I
have to help her do most things, sit up in bed, brush her teeth, tend to all her
basic needs. I have become her carer. My husband is having to run the business
alone.”
Clare is now taking part in a class action suit against Glaxo Smith Kline, the
maker of Cervarix, along with 10 other sets of parents whose daughters have
suffered adverse reactions to the vaccine since the programme began last autumn.
“We are being contacted every day by new people,” says Peter Todd, a solicitor
of Hodge Jones and Allen in London, who is handling the case. “The basis of the
claim is under the Consumer Protection Act, implemented after the thalidomide
scandal. Consumers are entitled to redress if they suffered injury as a result
of a defective product and this turns on a reasonable expectation of safety. As
the manufacturers themselves give a big long list of adverse effects, presumably
they accept that reactions will occur.”
Cervarix burst into the headlines last week when Natalie Morton, 14, died two
hours after being given the jab at the Blue Coat Church of England school in
Coventry. After a post-mortem examination revealed that she had a previously
undetected tumour in her chest which a Home Office pathologist described as “so
severe that death could have arisen at any point”, health officials in the city
declared the vaccination programme would resume.
Natalie Morton, 14, died two hours after
being given the vaccine, though a post-mortem
examination showed she had an undetected tumour
Glaxo Smith Kline, it seemed, was off the hook. Yet privately some National
Health Service doctors are of the view that the injection might well have been a
catalyst. Certainly Clare Ramagge says that consultants who have examined
Rebecca have indicated that the vaccination was a trigger for her collapse. “It
is being made clear that in children who have got any condition that could be
triggered by this jab, it will trigger it,” says Clare, who points out that the
consent letter Rebecca had brought home from school mentioned only the most
common side effects.
Julie Jones, another of the parents who has joined the class action, thinks the
vaccine is to blame for her daughter’s deterioration. On May 16, Stacey, 18,
went to the local sports centre in Ringsfield, West Midlands, for her third and
final inoculation. It was the last day Julie would see her daughter behaving
normally.
“That evening she went out with my sister and brother-in-law to a party. She was
very agitated all night. The next night she had a panic attack. She kept saying
she couldn’t breathe, she was hyperventilating.” Two days later she suffered an
epileptic fit and was admitted to hospital. “They told us it was sleep
deprivation. But the seizures continued. We took her straight back and she was
admitted for eight weeks.”
It is thought Stacey is suffering from encephalitis. She is now in a brain
rehabilitation unit in Birmingham. “To me it’s like looking at a shell,” says
Julie. “She has a sort of zombie look in her eyes. She walks with her head down
and her arms pulled in. It’s turned our lives around.”
Paige Brennan, 13, from Telford, remains seriously ill at Birmingham children’s
hospital, six months after suffering brain damage within five days of being
given the last vaccination in her course of three. She has been unable to speak
or feed without a tube and has only recently been trying to communicate.
Her parents say they were not made aware of any side effects associated with
Cervarix. If they had been, they would never have allowed her to have it.
“She had nothing wrong with her before. She was healthy. Soon after having this
injection she collapsed with a seizure,” says her mother Margaret Brennan, 46.
“I’m there every day at the hospital. It can take two years for the brain to
recover, so all we can do right now is hope.”
Such stories are certain to alarm parents who otherwise might have been
satisfied that their daughters were being properly protected against cervical
cancer in later years. The death of Jade Goody, the reality TV star, led to a
rise in young women wishing to have the vaccine. Now Natalie Morton’s death —
and emerging news of the other claims — is throwing that into doubt.
As with the MMR jab, Cervarix is not a one-shot treatment. It has to be
administered on three separate occasions over six months. So parents whose
daughters have had the first injection must now have two more moments of worry
as their daughters go forward in the scheme.
Doctors want to vaccinate as many young girls as possible before they become
sexually active, so they will be protected during their teenage years. It is
thought the vaccine is effective for 10 years, thus potentially protecting women
until they are 22 or 23, after which time sexual habits typically tend to calm
down.
Should parents be worried? Jim Boddington, a GP in Hackney, east London, says
that in his view Cervarix is a safe bet. “It’s been widely trialled and produced
excellent data,” he says. “When you roll out a programme of vaccinations to
millions, a minority will develop symptoms. Some would have developed those
symptoms anyway and people are very quick to make causal affiliations.”
This spring the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency showed that of the
700,000 schoolgirls vaccinated last year, more than 1,300 had officially
reported an adverse reaction, ranging from convulsions and nausea to pain in the
joints. That is a percentage of 0.2%. Peter Todd says he has seen slightly
higher figures reported and acknowledges that the risk seems “relatively low”
but points out that if you were one of the hundreds affected, you might feel
differently.
Certainly some are now deciding it is a risk too far. Kirstene Glynn, 33, a
community carer from Musselburgh, near Edinburgh, will not let her daughter
Hayley, 15, have the vaccine: “I refused because when I found out online about
the vaccine, all I found out was horrendous. And the more I discovered, the
worse it got. There are all these side effects which we are not being told
about.” Such as? “Seizures. Migraine. Muscle pain. Obviously in Natalie Morton’s
case she was killed by her tumour, but in my view you shouldn’t give it to
children with underlying conditions. If she hadn’t had the jab she might be
alive now.”
This is not to say that Kirstene is anti-vaccines per se. Her three daughters
have all had the MMR jab “because the benefits outweigh the risk. And you are
more likely to catch measles than cervical cancer, aren’t you? I have talked to
Hayley about her sexual health and she knows all about condoms and having
regular smears. You still have to have smears, you know, whether you have been
inoculated or not”.
Yet Kirstene had her daughter at the age of 17. Surely she should know about the
dangers posed for young women by having sex early: “I wouldn’t recommend having
a child at 17 and I certainly don’t want it for Hayley. She’s a clever girl and
I want her to go to university. But girls are going to do what they are going to
do, aren’t they? They just do what they want.”
Maybe that’s the problem, says Richard Millard, a Hampshire GP. “There is a view
that simply inoculating young women is taking the line of least resistance, a
sort of liberal agenda which has been peddled since the 1960s with pretty
disastrous effects,” he says. “We have more teenage pregnancies than anywhere
else in Europe, and the amount of STD [sexually transmitted disease] in this
country now is frankly out of control.”
Why not rethink the whole landscape of teenage sex, he suggests: “There are
plenty of other things one could do which would reduce the risk of contracting
cervical cancer, such as encouraging young women to start sexual activity later
and discouraging promiscuity. A giant vaccination programme is a sort of tacit
agreement that sexual activity for teenage girls is all right.”
Julie Jones is in no doubt. Asked whether she would advise parents to let their
daughter have the jab, she says: “I don’t want it to happen to anyone else. I
want the programme to be stopped in schools. They are only kids and they are
being ushered into a scheme like cattle. And they are too young. It is
ridiculous to expect that young girls of 12 or 13 will be having sex anyway.
They are young and very vulnerable.”
Vaccine figures
By 2011 all girls under 18 will have been offered the Cervarix vaccine
1.4m children have taken part in the vaccination programme since it began last
September
The vaccine is delivered in three doses over six months nThe immunisation of 12-
and 13-year-olds costs taxpayers £100m a year; the catch-up campaign for girls
under 18 costs £200m a year
The vaccine protects against the two strains of HPV (16 and 18) that cause
cervical cancer in seven out of 10 cases
Each year there are 899 deaths in the UK from cancer of the cervix