Vaccinating Teens During Menstrual Phase May Increase Adverse Reactions

Now hold on one hormonal minute…Vaccinating Teens During Menstrual Phase May Increase Adverse Reactions

August 15, 2008

By

Leslie Carol Botha
H. Sandra Chevalier-Batik

Why has there not been any mention of the potentially adverse effects of Merck’s cervical cancer vaccination, Gardasil® in relationship to the timing of the inoculation and where a young woman is in her menstrual cycle? This information is especially critical considering the vaccination is recommended for adolescent girls from the age of nine to young women up to 26-years.

Why is it that women are constantly forced into a male medical model which blatantly ignores their menstrual health and administers drugs, surgeries, and vaccinations without any regard to where they are in their hormone cycle?

This is outrageous. Even though women are asked to fill out the date of their last menstrual period (LMP) that information is used primarily to note that a woman is not pregnant. But it is much more valuable than that; the date of the LMP could actually be indicative of why that woman is in the doctor’s office to begin with.

Every cycling woman, who is aware of the changes that her body goes through prior to menstruation, knows that she is more prone to infections, colds, fatigue, irritability and a general feeling of malaise at this time. All of these issues are a direct result of hormonal changes that are cycling through her entire body, from the brain right on down to the uterus. Why haven’t the clinical researchers, FDA/CDC oversight committees, gynecologists, pediatricians or family practice physicians who have approved and administered Gardasil® considered how the injection of this chemical cocktail might affect a still maturing female body that is least able to defend itself during the paramenstrum?*

As the female hormone levels of estrogen and progesterone decrease during the premenstrual phase, the female body begins the process of releasing the uterine lining in the act of menstruation. The decrease in hormones actually affects a woman’s energy levels and her emotions. The immune system becomes more compromised, and that translates to a lowered defense system to fight off invading, foreign toxins.

Due to limited access to women’s menstrual health education, many women are totally unaware of the systemic aspects of their feminine hormone cycle. The medical, pharmaceutical industrial complex continues to ignore the premenstrual phase of menstrual cycle as a factor in testing and administration of drugs and vaccines. The only question women have to ask themselves is, “Is that policy based in ignorance, arrogance or methodical design?”

In her 1977 groundbreaking book, “The Premenstrual Syndrome”, Katharina Dalton noted that drug reactions “…are common during the premenstrum and may follow administration of antibiotics and inoculations. Confusion may occur as to the real origin of such reactions. In double-blind, clinical trials the placebo drugs are often reported to have side effects such as increased drowsiness, headache, nausea, or increased pain; which may be no more than the usual premenstrual symptoms which have not been meticulously observed and reported.” ^1.

Dalton’s work is intriguing and her studies compelling. However, feminists dismissed the book and the author in the 1980’s, because the premise was considered damning to women suffering from premenstrual syndrome. And rightly so. Dalton stated in the preface to her book, “…In those days we believed that the premenstrual syndrome was a rare condition, but we know now that it is the world’s commonest, and probably oldest, disease.”^2.

Classifying PMS as a disease provided the pharmaceutical and medical industry the leveraged justification that they skillfully exploited to extort billions of dollars from the systematic the medicalization of women’s bodies.

Fortunately, there is a growing body of clinical researchers, health practitioners, university professors, media professionals, feminists, and lay people who are beginning to realize that the menstrual cycle is not an illness or disease. Menstruation is becoming recognized as a natural cycle, that when understood and experienced holistically, could add healthy years to women’s lives.

Regrettably, Dalton’s work concerning premenstrual syndrome as it related to common drug reactions during the premenstruum was ignored — the issue denied; and many women have suffered in the past 40-years. The pharmaceutical, medical industrial complex filled the void of our self-knowledge and lack of understanding with calculated marketing campaigns that methodically exploited every aspect of a woman’s natural cycle.

Women, continue to read more life-saving information about your period….