August 2, 2008
Is HPV Vaccine to Blame for a Teen’s Paralysis?
About a month after being vaccinated against the cervical cancer-causing HPV virus, 13-year-old Jenny Tetlock missed the lowest hurdle in gym class, the first hint of the degenerative muscle disease that, 15 months later, has left the previously healthy teenager nearly completely paralyzed. Did the vaccine, Gardasil, cause her condition? Her father, Philip Tetlock, a psychology professor at UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, has embarked on an odyssey to find out whether the vaccine or random coincidence is to blame.
As father and scientist, Tetlock has contacted top medical experts, posted pleas on discussion boards looking for other teens who’ve experienced neurological problems post-vaccination and has been desperately trying to get the government to open an investigation into his daughter’s case. “The weakening process is gradual so it may take months for parents to notice what is going on,” he writes me in an E-mail. He started a blog a few weeks ago that shows photos of his sweet-faced teen and reveals his anger and frustration in the form of a box counting the days that he has yet to get a response from the government’s Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment Network. As of today, it’s 28.
He’s not the only one to raise an alarm. The conservative public watchdog group Judicial Watch has been periodically obtaining adverse event reports on Gardasil from the Food and Drug Administration. I received the group’s latest warning this week: of 10 deaths linked to Gardasil since September 2007 and 140 reports so far this year of serious effects such as miscarriage and Guillain-Barré syndrome, a nervous system disease that causes weakness and tingling in the arms and legs. (But these reports filed by patients or doctors with the government’s vaccine adverse event reporting system may or may not reflect true vaccine risks.
