Tag Archives: gardasil

Gardasil – saves your cervix, does nothing to your ovaries

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Vaccine myths are like the fart smell that somehow gets trapped in your air-conditioning in your car.  They both seem to keep going around and around, reappearing at random, and are both similarly fetid.

Doing the rounds of the social media sites this week is the old chestnut that Gardasil, the human papilloma virus vaccine, caused a teenage girl’s ovaries to implode, and that Merck, that rich powerful conglomerate of evil, conveniently forgot to investigate the effects of the vaccine on the female reproductive system.

Actually, this is old news.  I wrote a couple of blogs in in the past about Gardasil conspiracy theories, including one about the whole Gardasil-kills-ovaries thing (and another here).  In the last couple of years, nothing much has really changed, well, except that the benefit of the HPV vaccine has become much clearer, and the hysteria of the anti-vaxxers has become more pronounced as a result.

For example, the article that’s recently been making the rounds is a 2013 article by Jonathan Benson at Natural News.  This particular article was discussing a paper published in the highly esteemed British Medical Journal [1] (which you can read for yourself here). Benson’s opening paragraph shows how ignorant and/or biased anti-vaccine proponents can be.

“A newly-published study has revealed that Merck & Co., the corporate mastermind behind the infamous Gardasil vaccine for human papillomavirus (HPV), conveniently forgot to research the effects of this deadly vaccine on women’s reproductive systems. And at least one young woman, in this case from Australia, bore the brunt of this inexcusable failure after discovering that her own ovaries had been completely destroyed as a result of getting the vaccine.”

There are a couple of big errors here.  First, the article in the BMJ isn’t a study, merely a case report.  There’s a big difference, namely the fact that a case report is just that, a report of a single case.  It’s not a study that proves that one thing causes another, but merely raises the possibility that there might be something going on that other peers should be aware of or further investigate.  The lack of definitive proof didn’t stop Benson from making his other big error, leaping to a rather tenuous conclusion that this girl’s ovaries imploded because of Gardasil.

In actual fact, Premature Ovarian Insufficiency (or POI), was known about long before the Gardasil vaccine was invented.  In 1986, the known incidence was about 1 in 10,000 young women between the ages of 15 and 29 [2], and there’s no known cause in more than 90% of the cases.

So, if Gardasil was one cause of ovary implosion in young women, then it stands to reason that the rate of ovary implosion would be much higher after the introduction of Gardasil.  Is that the case?

As it turns out, the answer is no.  A big fat no.  According to the Therapeutic Goods Administration in Australia, the number of Gardasil doses that have been administered in Australia has been more than 9 million.  The number of reports of ovary implosion? Three.  Just three.

That works out to be a rate of 0.003 per 10,000.

That’s quite a lot less than the rate of ovary implosion before Gardasil was invented.  Maybe Gardasil protects your ovaries rather than destroys them.

So Gardasil isn’t rendering anyone’s daughters infertile.  The TGA has reviewed this issue a number of times and reached the same conclusion every time … there is NO link between Premature Ovarian Insufficiency and the HPV vaccine.

What the HPV vaccine is doing is reducing the incidence of genital warts and gynaecological cancers.  For example, in the years leading up to the introduction of the HPV vaccine, the number of women presenting with genital warts was about 1 in 10.  In the four years after the vaccine was introduced, the rate of genital warts had fallen between 70 to 90% depending on the age group.  The effect was especially obvious in the women under the age of 21, whose rate of genital warts dropped from over 1 in 10 to less than 1 in 100 after the introduction of the vaccine.

The rate of cervical cancer changes also fell, with a study by Gertig and colleagues in 2013 showing that a full three doses of the HPV vaccine decreased the risk of high-grade (that is, nasty pre-cancerous) pap smear changes by nearly 50% [3].

So you won’t hear this from the Natural News team or others of their ilk, but vaccination with the HPV vaccine decreases your risk of genital warts by over 90%, decreases your risk of nasty cervical cancer changes by about 50%, and increases your risk of ovarian implosion by about 0%.

Don’t let the repugnant hot air of the anti-vaxxers put you off.  Vaccination with the HPV vaccine is safe and effective, not harmful like the vaccine myths would have you believe.

References

[1]        Little DT, Ward HR. Premature ovarian failure 3 years after menarche in a 16-year-old girl following human papillomavirus vaccination. BMJ Case Rep 2012;2012.
[2]        Coulam CB, Adamson SC, Annegers JF. Incidence of premature ovarian failure. Obstet Gynecol 1986 Apr;67(4):604-6.
[3]        Gertig DM, Brotherton JM, Budd AC, Drennan K, Chappell G, Saville AM. Impact of a population-based HPV vaccination program on cervical abnormalities: a data linkage study. BMC medicine 2013;11:227.

Different strokes for different folks? Why vaccinations don’t lead to mini-strokes

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Screen Shot 2015-05-31 at 4.46.48 pmOne of my Facebook friends messaged me a link the other day. It was to an article that had been popping up on his Facebook feed, originally published by Health Impact News (http://goo.gl/V3A5Mb).

The article is a report by John P. Thomas, building on the previous work of Andrew Moulden. Moulden failed his medical residency in Canada (http://goo.gl/BBKG5z), but used his doctorate in psychology to promote himself as a doctor.

Moulden believed that “Multiple factors can work together to trigger a single type of reaction in the body, which can then produce various sets of symptoms. Even though there were different sets of symptoms and different disease names given to each one, they were actually all part of a spectrum of diseases that he called Moulden Anoxia Spectrum Syndromes. Learning disabilities, autism, Alzheimer’s, irritable bowel disease, Crohn’s disease, colitis, food allergies, shaken baby syndrome, sudden infant death, idiopathic seizure disorders, Gulf War syndrome, Gardasil adverse reactions, schizophrenia, Tourette’s syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, expressive aphasia, impaired speech skills, attention deficit disorders, silent ischemic strokes, blood clots, idiopathic thrombocytopenia purpura, Parkinson’s disease, and other modern neurodevelopmental disorders are closely related in many ways, and are part of a larger syndrome.” (http://goo.gl/kTNRMV)

Moulden Anoxia Spectrum Syndromes isn’t found in any medical textbook, and there is no evidence that Autism, Alzheimer’s, Gulf War Syndrome, food allergies and Shaken Baby Syndrome are at all causally related.

Besides, the term ‘anoxia’ is a medical term meaning ‘without oxygen’. Moulden is obviously suggesting that every one of those disparate conditions is fundamentally caused by a lack of oxygen to somewhere, and while his logic has many flaws, this is the fatal one. Food allergies are not related to lack of oxygen. Neither are reactions to the Gardasil vaccine. And we know that Autism is defined by structural and functional changes in the brain that occur in the womb, and can be detected as early as a month after birth [1]. Autism is primarily genetic – autistic brains have excess numbers of dysfunctional nerve cells that are unable to form the correct synaptic scaffolding, leaving a brain that’s large [2, 3], but out-of-sync. There is nothing about autism that’s related to low oxygen. ADHD is similarly genetic and neurodevelopmental in origin [4]. The only thing suffering from lack of oxygen is Moulden’s theories.

Thomas then tries to extend this already tenuous medical hypothesis by claiming that vaccines cause damage to capillaries in ‘watershed’ areas which, according to his definition (not the medical definition), are “very small areas of tissue (groups of cells) that are served by a single blood vessel called a capillary” (http://goo.gl/4IlUI7) He suggests that certain cranial nerves are vulnerable to these ‘watershed’ injuries, which then result in changes in the way the face moves.

The cause for these ‘watershed’ injuries? “The blood is being sludged up in multiple areas of the body, which is causing ischemia, damage to tissue, functional disorders, and disease. This is not genetic. It is acquired. The drop in the corner of the mouth is the result of low zeta potential and the MASS process. People with autism spectrum disorders, neurodevelopmental disorders, ADHD, and those who are having adverse effects from vaccines such as hepatitis, flu, anthrax, Gardasil, DPT, MMR, etc. are having a generic response. The body is reacting to having foreign matter put into it.”

In other words, he’s suggesting that vaccinations essentially cause strokes.

From here, the article becomes a bamboozling cacophony of legitimate but irrelevant facts, diagrams, factoids, and recommendations. For example, Thomas explains the signs of damage to the third, fourth, sixth and seventh cranial nerves, and cites the damage by actual strokes as examples. Well, that’s fine, except that real strokes don’t involve damage to capillaries, but blockage of arteries, and have nothing to do with vaccination.

He also makes statements that are simply wrong, like “The seventh cranial nerve primarily controls the lower half of the face” (actually the seventh cranial nerve, also called the facial nerve, controls the muscles of the whole face – http://goo.gl/m9S7Gd). And, “When we see seventh cranial nerve damage, we can be sure that the damage is not isolated to the seventh cranial nerve – the damage is happening everywhere” (except in Bells Palsy … and some parotid tumours … and some strokes … and lots of other things).

He also makes the ridiculous claim that autism causes facial droop without explaining why, suggests that weakness of the muscles of the eyes controlled by the sixth cranial nerve is often the first sign of vaccine damage, and that ‘watershed’ damage to the brainstem from vaccination is the cause of SIDS.

Thomas then attempts to justify his conjecture by describing the case of a single baby boy whom he claims died from sudden infant death post vaccination – “His family and his physicians watched him slowly die while the respirator did his breathing for him. Basically they were watching his brain as he went through the stages of sudden infant death after vaccine exposure”. Except that death after nineteen days is not ‘sudden’, and the description of this child’s tragic death is nothing like SIDS. And his only reference to this case? Not an official forensic report, but a ‘report’ written by Andrew Moulden, which was simply an offensive and detestable attempt to leverage the heart-wrenching death of a fifteen month old boy to push his idealistic agenda (http://goo.gl/ysoCtQ).

I could go on. There are pages of material that simply defy rational thinking. He even goes on to question germ theory, and states that “Vaccines are one of the largest triggers of excessive non-specific immune hyperstimulation, which ultimately leads to blood sludging, clotting, and loss of negative zeta. The combined effect of all these factors produce illness, disability, and death.”

There is no credible medical evidence to back up any of Thomas’s claims, nor the claims of Moulden before him. Together, they openly defy centuries of scientific knowledge, modern science, and the observations of every parent whose children have been vaccinated.

Lets face it – if vaccines really caused mini-strokes, we wouldn’t need the dubious work of Moulden and his disciples to discover it. We would have all seen it.

There are a lot of very questionable theories that get promoted on the internet as valid science. Don’t fall for it. There’s no evidence for Moulden Anoxia Spectrum Syndromes, and the only connection between conditions like Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Shaken Baby Syndrome and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is not vaccination, but the pathetic attempt to try and connect them by pseudoscientists with an idealistic barrow to push.

References

[1]        Pierce K. Exploring the Causes of Autism – The Role of Genetics and The Environment (Keynote Symposium 11). Asia Pacific Autism Conference; 2013 10 August; Adelaide, Australia: APAC 2013; 2013.

[2]        Courchesne E, Carper R, Akshoomoff N. Evidence of brain overgrowth in the first year of life in autism. JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association 2003 Jul 16;290(3):337-44.

[3]        Shen MD, Nordahl CW, Young GS, et al. Early brain enlargement and elevated extra-axial fluid in infants who develop autism spectrum disorder. Brain : a journal of neurology 2013 Sep;136(Pt 9):2825-35.

[4]        Cortese S. The neurobiology and genetics of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): what every clinician should know. European journal of paediatric neurology : EJPN : official journal of the European Paediatric Neurology Society 2012 Sep;16(5):422-33.

Needles of Death

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“Acupuncture caused womans heart to implode.

A woman in the prime of her adult life had that life ripped away by acupuncture, a known deadly complementary therapy.  Worse, though, is that acupuncture therapists don’t warn of these potentially fatal outcomes or actively hide them.

Ernst(1) documents two cases of healthy women who have had their lives torn away from them as murderous acupuncture needles were inserted into their vital chest organs causing them to instantly fail.  Each woman would have died in agony as their heart and lungs were unable to get blood to their body’s vital organs.

One woman, a forty-four year old lady, had an acupuncture needle pushed into her heart, causing severe pain and breathlessness.  When she alerted the acupuncturist to her peril, his “cure” was to insert another needle, causing a full-blown cardiac arrest.

Another woman, twenty-six years old, died after an acupuncture needle was inserted into one of her lungs causing the lung to collapse.  She eventually died from a tension pneumothorax, in which the punctured lung leaks air into the chest cavity with every breath, compressing the other chest organs like a Boa Constrictor.  A tension pneumothorax is one of the most terrifying ways to die.

Acupuncture is a multi-billion dollar industry.  Despite its potentially fatal consequences, it goes on, unabated and unregulated.  People need to be warned before more lives are lost to the needles of death.”

Do you feel scared of acupuncture after reading this?  Should you believe it?

These sort of beat up articles occur all the time.  A case report which links a vaccine or drug to an adverse outcome is exaggerated with highly emotional language and posted on conspiracy-driven anti-vaccination blog or site.  Then it gets sent around on Facebook or Twitter like an intellectual virus, taken as evidence of the evils of corporate western medicine by people who take the information on face value.

The latest that came across my Facebook page was of a claim that a 16 year old girls ovaries shrivelled after being exposed to the Gardasil vaccine for the Human Papilloma Virus/cervical cancer.(4)

The problem that these anti-vaccine activists have is that case studies, while interesting, have no evidentiary weight behind them.  Trying to make a case study out to be definitive proof for anything is like putting a grain of salt into a swimming pool and suggesting that you have salt-water.  How many cases of premature ovarian failure have been reported as a direct result of the Gardasil vaccine? I don’t know the exact answer to that, but I’d be surprised if I couldn’t count them on one hand.  Compare that to the hundreds of thousands of women vaccinated with the Gardasil vaccine.

One of the respondents to the anti-Gardasil blog(4) said, “This vaccine has never prevented a single case of oral, cervical, or anal cancer …”  Actually, it has likely prevented thousands.(2)  Case studies can’t see the bigger picture.

And for every case study against western medicine, there are just as many against complementary medicines and practices.  (There would be more, except that the dearth of regulation of the alternative and complementary therapy industry means that most of the adverse outcomes of alternative treatments go unreported).

Braun et al(3) report the case of a twenty-nine year old woman discovered to have an entirely treatable early form of cervical cancer on a pap smear, who died in agony from widespread metastatic cancer of the cervix, despite thirteen years of various complementary medicines (a homeopathic therapy consisting of a vitamin C-containing regimen and subcutaneous administration of mistletoe lectins, “regional hyperthermia”, Horvi-Reintoxin enzyme therapy, and pyrogenic lysates of bacteria combined application of Carnivora-Mistletoe-Ukrain).  This woman’s cancer was caused by HPV-18, which would have been prevented by Gardasil (if it was available to her.)

The point of the story is this: All treatments have side effects or complications.  If you look hard enough, you will find case reports of direct or associated illness from just about any traditional or complementary therapy.  But case studies are not good evidence.  They do not see the bigger picture.  They can not be generalised.

In trained hands, and for the right uses, acupuncture can be a very powerful therapeutic tool.  Acupuncture still does more good than harm.

In trained hands, and for the right uses, Gardasil and vaccines in general are very powerful preventative tools.  Vaccines still do more good than harm.

Neither are “needles of death”.

References

1. Ernst E. Acupuncture – a treatment to die for? Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 2010 Oct;103(10):384-5. PubMed PMID: 20929887.

2. Jin XW, Lipold L, Sikon A, Rome E. Human papillomavirus vaccine: safe, effective, underused. Cleveland Clinic journal of medicine. 2013 Jan;80(1):49-60. PubMed PMID: 23288945.

3. Braun S, Reimer D, Strobl I, Wieland U, Wiesbauer P, Muller-Holzner E, et al. Fatal invasive cervical cancer secondary to untreated cervical dysplasia: a case report. Journal of medical case reports. 2011;5:316. PubMed PMID: 21767367. Pubmed Central PMCID: 3156764.

4. http://www.thelibertybeacon.com/2013/07/22/gardasil-destroys-girls-ovaries-research-on-ovaries-never-considered-10497/