The word is out: despite what the CDC would have you believe, Gardasil's safety record is in serious question. As of September 28, 2010, the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) has more than 18,000 Gardasil-related adverse events listed in it, including at least 65 deaths.As a vaccine used in the developed world, the science speaks for itself: Gardasil can't – and never will -- replace Pap smears, which are the reason that the incidence of cervical cancer is so low in the United States after decades of including pap smears in routine medical care for women.
Today, cervical cancer is not even in the top 10 cancers that kill American women every year.
As a vaccine for children, it doesn't make sense to vaccinate to try to prevent an infection that is cleared from your body without any negative effects within two years in most healthy persons, and is not transmitted in a school setting like other airborne diseases that are easily transmitted in crowded conditions.
Gardasil is designed to prevent only two of at least 15 strains of HPV that can lead to cervical cancer in those who do not clear the virus from their body within two years and become chronically infected.
There is also some evidence that Gardasil-induced immunity may wane after about five years. Pre-licensure clinical trials did not follow young girls or women for decades to find out if the vaccine does, in fact, prevent cervical cancer.
You can -- and should -- read more about the science vs. the politics of the Gardasil fiasco; especially if you either weren't listening to me before or somehow missed those of us who had raised our ire and eyebrows regarding the vaccine.
What interests me most now is how Dr. Mercola's article supports what I've been saying about the new eugenics in this country. From Dr. Mercola's article:
[C]ertain populations in the US are more prone to getting cervical cancer. According to CervicalCancerCampaign.org:"Cervical cancer occurs most often in certain groups of women in the United States including African-American women, Hispanic women, white (non-Hispanic) women living in rural New York State and northern New England, American Indian women, and Vietnamese-American women.
- Hispanic women have twice the rate of cervical cancer compared to non-Hispanic white women. African-American women develop this cancer about 50 percent more than non-Hispanic white women".
These disparities are due, in part, from poor access to health care. The women who are most at risk for the disease are women who do not have regular check-ups that include pap tests.
Official reports from the CDC and WHO estimate that between 11,000 and 12,000 women in the US are diagnosed with cervical cancer each year, and 3,800 to 4,100 die from it.
About half of these women had never had a pap smear before they discovered they had cervical cancer. The majority of the others had not had a pap smear within the previous five years.
According to the CDC's report on HPV to Congress in 2004:
"Cervical cancer is an uncommon consequence of HPV infection in women, especially if they are screened for cancer regularly with pap tests and have appropriate follow-up of abnormalities.
The purpose of screening with the pap test is to detect cervical abnormalities that can be treated, thereby preventing progression to invasive cervical cancer, and also to detect invasive cervical cancer at a very early stage. If detected early and managed promptly, survival rates for cervical cancer are over 90 percent."
A study published in 2000 in the Archives of Family Medicine also showed that in the US, women who are elderly, unmarried, and uninsured are more likely to be diagnosed at a late stage of cervical cancer.
