The heavily marketed cancer-prevention vaccine Gardasil may produce serious side effects that have caused seizures, blood clots, paralysis and even death in the very girls it was supposed to protect.
Government health officials received 7,802 reports of adverse events from June 2006, when Gardasil was licensed, through last April. Anecdotal reports of severe illnesses occurring – sometimes shortly after inoculations -- have cropped up all over the United States, with Gardasil lawsuits already beginning to be filed against manufacturer Merck & Co.
If you, your daughter or someone you love received a Gardasil vaccination and suffered severe side effects, you may want to contact a Gardasil attorney for a free evaluation of your case. Kline & Specter, PC, with 60 lawyers, several of whom are also doctors, is a national leader in pharmaceutical litigation. The law firm played a key role in the $4.85 billion settlement against Vioxx, another Merck product.
Gardasil was approved for girls as young as age nine to prevent the transmission of certain strains of the human papillomavirus, or HPV, that cause cervical cancer. Merck at the time ballyhooed Gardasil as having the potential to ultimately eliminate most cervical cancers. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended the vaccination for all girls 11 and 12 years old.
But safety concerns arose after the CDC received 7,802 reports of adverse events, including 15 deaths, after girls received the vaccine. (CBS later reported 18 deaths.) The agency said definitive links between Gardasil and the deaths had not been established, but neither was such an association ruled out.
Among fatalities cited in news reports were a 17-year-old girl in New York who collapsed and died of a suspected heart problem two days after getting the last in the series of three Gardasil injections. An 11-year-old girl suffered a heart attack three days after a Gardasil shot. And a 12-year-old girl with no prior medical problems died in her sleep three weeks after a Gardasil shot.
There were also 31 reports of Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS), which can lead to temporary paralysis, often through the entire body. Other forms of paralysis reported after Gardasil vaccinations were treatment-resistant and life-threatening. A number of parents reported their children passing out or suffering seizures after being given the vaccine.
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