DAVID KILLICK
themercury.com.au
07/04/2010

JUST 55 per cent of Tasmanian schoolgirls have taken up the offer of free vaccination against cervical cancer.

Health authorities say they are surprised and disappointed at the low take-up rate.

Although more than 100,000 Tasmanian women and girls have been vaccinated, acting public health director Chrissie Pickin said take-up of the Gardasil and Cervarix vaccines had been slower than she had hoped.

“You would think that with a new vaccine, a safe vaccine, able to protect your children against cancer, people would be knocking the doors down,” she said.

“Fifty-five per cent is not as good as we’d like but that’s the figure for schoolchildren who have completed all three doses so we do suspect that more will have had the first and the second doses, but clearly we would like them to complete all three doses.”

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David Gutierrez
NaturalNews.com
06/24/2010

A 16-year-old girl lost nearly all of her vision within 10 days of receiving the second course of her vaccine against the human papilloma virus (HPV), reports a case study in the Journal of Child Neurology.

The HPV vaccine is designed to prevent infection by the strains of the virus that are responsible for the majority of cervical cancer and genital warts cases.

The study recounts the case of a previously healthy teenage girl who developed a headache on the left side of her head and began to lose vision in her right eye eight days after receiving her second HPV vaccine shot. Over the course of the following 48 hours, the pain spread across her head and she began to lose sight in her left eye as well.

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SEO Press Releases
06/23/2010

Vaccine Adverse Reporting System (VAERS) May statistics on HPV vaccine injury and death now stands at 18,445 adverse reaction (increase of 1,000 in the last 6 weeks), 75 deaths, 3,771 not recovered, 4,905 unknown recovered, 610 disabled, 355 life threatening, 7,858 ER visits, 1,865 hospitalized. The numbers reflect only 1 to 10% of the population reporting.

Recent news stories have reported that only 1/3 of girls in the U.S. are getting vaccinated. With the FDA’s blessing, Merck is now actively pursuing 9 to 26 year old boys – and reports of adverse events are now coming in.

If this is not enough cause for concern, the Gardasil Access Program, a five-year organized effort between Merck & Company, Axios Healthcare Development (AHD) and Axios International is now donating 3 million doses of the vaccine to low-income countries around the world.

As reported in the June 13 Vaccine Examiner article, Merck targets low-income countries for further HPV vaccination ‘projects’ , 72 countries are eligible for the program and with a downloadable application form for organizations and institutions in these low-income countries to use.

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NewsInferno
06/17/2010

The Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has put off a decision on whether or not it should approve the expanded use of the Gardasil vaccine to older women, ages 27 to 45. The FDA’s decision, which was expected sometime next week, will not come until later this year.

Approved in 2006, Gardasil prevents four strains of HPV, two of which cause 70 percent of all cervical cancers. The other two HPV strains are responsible for about 90 percent of genital warts. The vaccine is approved for use in girls and young women, ages 9 to 26. Last year, the FDA approved Gardasil’s use in males 9 to 26 years old to prevent genital warts caused by HPV.

Merck has been seeking approval to market Gardasil to older women for more than two years. But according to The Wall Street Journal, the FDA delayed its approval because it wanted longer-term data on Gardasil’s efficacy, after four years of follow-up. Merck & Co., the maker of Gardasil, provided that information last year. The efficacy rate after four years of follow up was 88.7 percent compared with 91 percent after two years.

The FDA would not comment on the delay, the Journal said.

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SEO Press Releases
06/21/2010

Within the last month reports from two women’s organizations focused global attention on the silent epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases (STD’s) and their plans to provide accessibility to care.

On June 8, health leaders at the WOMEN DELIVER conference in Washington D.C. called on the international community to commit resources to ensure women and girls have equal access to cervical cancer prevention technologies. A Declaration for Universal Access to Cervical Cancer Prevention was issued by leading women’s health, cancer and business organizations, including PATH, International Planned Parenthood Federation and the International Union Against Cancer.

The Declaration calls for swift action by the international community to provide financial/political commitments to accessibility for cervical cancer screening, treatment and vaccination citing cervical cancer as the leading cause of cancer-related death in developing countries, killing more than 270,000 women annually.

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