All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative correspondent for CBS News.

---

Yesterday I spoke to the families of young women who believe the Gardasil HPV vaccine may have – or did in fact – cause their child's serious illness. One of the cases involves a now 18-year old young woman named Amanda.

Amanda's parents say she developed a serious reaction to Gardasil after her first dose last summer. It began with soreness where she received the injection. The soreness eventually travelled down her arm, her legs, and led to a horrible autoimmune myofasciitis that is so painful Amanda had to go on morphine for the pain.

She was transformed, through the illness, from a high school varsity sport athlete to a chronically ill person who takes a handful of pills a day just to keep her illness tolerable. When she goes off the medicine, the excruciating pain and other debilitating symptoms return.

One thing that's different about Amanda's case than some of the others is that both of her parents medical doctors who didn't think twice about having their daughter get the shot – but are now second-guessing themselves. They call their daughter's illness after Gardasil "a very sobering experience."

Read full post…

As a CBS News correspondent, I learn something new every day. My latest education: oral contraception and its history. It came through reporting on Lybrel, the controversial new birth-control pill that was just approved by the FDA.

Lybrel eliminates the monthly menstrual cycle — indefinitely. Women take it every single day for as long as they hope to avoid pregnancy.

The choice to keep or dispense with periods is now up to the women of America. Lybrel's maker, Wyeth, and even doctors involved in its clinical trials say it's no riskier than taking traditional birth-control pills.

Other health care professionals would prefer more study on Lybrel's long-term effects. But no matter where you fall in the argument, here are some facts I found very interesting:

All forms of the pill work by stopping ovulation and suppressing periods.
That should mean, technically, women taking the traditional "three weeks on/one week off" pill packet shouldn't bleed every month. But they do.

According to longtime contraceptive researcher Sheldon Segal, a professor of pharmacology at Cornell Medical School, those aren't "real periods." Women on traditional birth-control pills aren't shedding an unfertilized egg with the uterine lining. They're experiencing hormone withdrawal bleeds from the placebo effect.

Read full post…