Alert After U.K. Cervical Cancer Vaccine Death

By: Tucker Reals
Topics: In The News

(CBS/AP)

Parents, schools and doctors across the United Kingdom were on alert Tuesday after a 14-year-old English girl died from what appears to have been an extremely rare, severe reaction to the now-common cervical cancer vaccine.

The girl became ill soon after receiving the injection to prevent sexually transmitted human papillomavirus (HPV) on Monday at her school in Coventry, central England. She died in hospital just hours later.

She was given a vaccine called Cervarix manufactured by British drug giant GlaxoSmithKline.

CBS News medical correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton says that is not the shot commonly given to American girls, who are usually immunized with a drug made by Merck.

Dr. Ashton tells me that of of more than 23 million doses of the Merck vaccine, Gardasil, given in the United States, there have been less than 800 severe reactions documented. According to a recent article by the Journal of the American Medical Association, 32 of those reactions were deaths - but none of them could be definitively blamed on the vaccine. (Read more on this from "FiercePharma.com")

Gardasil was recently approved for males in the U.S.

In Britain, GSK said it was looking into the exact cause of the death and out of caution it quarantined all the shots of Cervarix from the batch used in Coventry.

"We are working with the Department of Health and MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) to better understand this case, as at this stage the exact cause of this tragic death is unknown," Glaxo medical director Dr. Pim Kon told British media.

A handful of other girls who received the shot at the same school also reported mild reactions - usually dizziness or nausea. None were hospitalized.

The MHRA, Britain's pharmaceutical watchdog agency, reports a total of 2,137 cases of adverse reactions to Cervarix out of 1.4 doses given in a study released on Sept. 24, 2009.

Of those, most were mild reactions similar to those experienced by the other girls at the Coventry school; pain in the area of the injection, dizziness and other well-known possible side effects.

British health officials urged parents not to panic, but to be extra vigilant for unusual side effects in girls given the jab.

Tucker Reals
Tucker Reals is a senior news editor and overnight site editor for CBSNews.com, based at CBS News' London bureau.

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by kimsl September 30, 2009 7:27 PM EDT: I wish CBS would have also mentioned that the gardasil north American version of cervarix, to which almost 50 girls have died and the serious complications like paralysis GBS the list goes on and on. Does no one think that Merck need a boost to their stock price after remember VIOXX was pulled from the shelves. They usded scare tactics and alot of money for all those advertisemnt. Do you see them anymore? Not so confident anymore. Why would you believe them and why would you let your daughters be lab rats. They do not know how long this vaccine will last. PLEASE go the the FDA website under vaccines and biologics check out the approval letter yes it is there freedom of information you know and then you will see that all the tests are still being done. Also find out what is in the vaccine shocking! Just be AWARE when in comes to money and big Pharma Also I believe on the cervical cancer is the 12th cancer so many others to worry about. Also Heart attack and Strokes kill millions and millions of people each year. Don't believe their scare tactics.; Reply to this comment

by mal2cats September 29, 2009 12:54 PM EDT

Gardisil does not prevent cervical cancer. It 'may' 'help' prevent/reduce genital warts. The type of genital warts affected by Gardisil do cause 'some' of the cases of cervical cancer. There are a lot of maybes there. These drugs have not be studied long enough nor thoroughly enough for them to be injected into young, not yet mature, bodies. They are giving this stuff to children. I wonder what medical horrors will appear in the coming years? I don't KNOW the drug is unsafe, but neither do I have any confidence that it is.

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by SusanStoHelit September 29, 2009 1:05 PM EDT: There are no maybes there. Just statistics. A fairly high percentage of cases of cervical cancer are in the class prevented by the vaccine. Those cancers KILL people. Plenty of people. You may not know how safe the drug is - but we know how deadly cancer is. And like every drug, this one has been studied and tested for decades.

Did you even bother to look at how long the drug had been studied before declaring it wasn't long enough?


by SusanStoHelit September 29, 2009 1:10 PM EDT: 11,000 women will be diagnosed with cervical cancer this year alone. FOUR THOUSAND women will DIE of cervical cancer this year.

FOUR THOUSAND.

This is a serious cancer, and it kills. It used to be the #1 killer before we got a bit more serious about detecting it - but it's still way up there. And it kills you in the middle of your life, not the end - usually you get it between 20 and 50. It takes mothers away from children, while they are still growing up.

It would take more than vague fear-mongering and extremely rare bad reactions to make me ignore the real risk of death as an alternative.


by SusanStoHelit September 29, 2009 12:02 PM EDT: Thousands die of the cancer prevented by this vaccine. There are risks to everything - but you have to balance the risks out. Avoiding a 1 in a billion risk of death, that leaves you open to a 1 in 10,000 risk of death - you've made a bad choice.

And yes, 32 deaths that may have been the vaccine - or may have been preexisting conditions, a variety of diseases that any teen girl had. If you look at 23 MILLION people, some of them will die in the next month - no matter what. If you give them a vaccine - they'll still die if they were going to - and it won't be because of the vaccine - but it'll be easy to think so. That's what they mean when they say deaths that could not be linked to the vaccine. 23 million people, some of them were going to die no matter what.; Reply to this comment


by bubbadubba September 29, 2009 10:26 AM EDT: 32 of those 800 SEVERE reactions were deaths - but none of them could be definitively blamed on the vaccine?

Kind of like American troop deaths in Iraq cannot be definitely blamed on terrorists or IED's I guess.; Reply to this comment