AIBU to withdraw consent for hpv vaccine

[Ilovehamabeads]

Signed the forms ages ago for DD to have the HPV vaccine tomorrow. I didn't really read up on it, other than the NHS info leaflet she bought home with the consent form.
Tomorrow is the day she's due to have the first jab. I'm now regretting signing that form so readily, having read more about it. I know in my head that the stories I've read are just the very, very few that went wrong out of millions. But, at the same time I'm thinking what if..
Would it be totally ridiculous to change my mind at the last minute? I think I just need a few people to tell me I'm an idiot for believing the evidence of a few, over the evidence of many!

Dd had it and she was fine, her arm was sore for a few days and she did have mild diarrhoea which is one of the side effects. I read up on it first and didn't see any horror stories anyway. And to those who say oh, girls will be fine if they don't have sex until 18 or 19 and only have 1 or 2 sexual partners - all well and good, but frankly you have no idea of the future sex life of your daughters. You might like that to be the case, but you don't know it will be.

Dd had it and she was fine, her arm was sore for a few days and she did have mild diarrhoea which is one of the side effects. I read up on it first and didn't see any horror stories anyway. And to those who say oh, girls will be fine if they don't have sex until 18 or 19 and only have 1 or 2 sexual partners - all well and good, but frankly you have no idea of the future sex life of your daughters. You might like that to be the case, but you don't know it will be.

I'm another one who wishes the hpv vaccine had been around when I was younger as I've had treatment caused by one of the more difficult to shift strains according to the doc that did my colposcopies.

I'm lucky that after a few six monthly call backs my last two results have been clear.

And fuck off with the 7-10 partners by the time they were 16. I hadn't even had one by then. Twat.

My life as I knew it ended in 2015.

I had a sore throat, oh ok maybe it is not a sore throat, the nurse practioneer then treated tonsilitis, when that didn't clear all the balloons went up and following a referrral I was fast tracked for head and neck cancer of the tonsil.

I then had the most vicious treatment.

30 rounds of radiotherapy.

6 rounds of chemo, at the end they were putting the line in, in the side of my hand because all my veins had collapsed.

I spent six months in bed, at times sleeping 18 hours a day, a lot of the time off my head on morphine.

The skin on my neck turned black and fell of in lumps, I will spare you the descriptions of how I had to prise my cracked and weeping skin off the pillow every morning.

I have no salivary glands so I can't eat real food, think OAP food.

As a result of no salivary glands I have little or no chance of dying with my own teeth as due to the lack of saliva they will eventually rot.

I can not have implants because the jaw has been radiated, if they your touch a jaw post radio you run the risk of introducing infection which can then only be treated by removing sections of your jaw. So as and when my teeth start to rot and need removing all of the above applies.

I could go on and on.....

Please don't let your daughter run this risk because the anti vaxxers have a new bandwagon.

I was in the first year where the HPV was offered in schools, I didn't have it. My DM and I discussed it, I used to have seizures as a child and young teen, and there was a lot in the news about girls having seizures after having the vaccine so we decided against it. It also only protects against one form of cervical cancer out of hundreds. I wasn't promiscuous so the likelihood of me contracting hpv was low anyway, I've never had any form of STD/STI always had normal results from tests. Personally I don't think it's necessary. Discuss with your daughter OP, she is old enough to understand and decide for herself if she wants the vaccine or not.

my DD has POTS which is one of the conditions potentially linked to the HPV jab. She fits exactly into the profile of girls in the Danish study (sporty, high achiever). She's been horrifically ill at times over the past 6 years.

BUT, and this is really important, she's had symptoms of POTS as far back as we can remember (once we knew what we were looking for), so all the jab could possibly have done is triggered a stronger development of the POTS, as could a virus, as could a trauma, as could lots of things.

I asked her a while back if she regretted having the HPV. She said no, that POTS wasn't ever going to kill her, but cervical cancer could.

FWIW, both other DDs have had the jab, one after we knew there might have been a possible link. Cancer kills, POTS doesn't.

If I had dd I’d definitely be consenting to HPV vaccination.

We have 4 DS, we have paid quite a lot of money to have the eldest 3 vaccinated with Gardasil (on each occasion our request to have it done on the NHS was declined after referral to a regional committee). Our own GP group believes strongly that all young people including males should be offered the jab and although it’s not the case yet, there are hints that it may be offered in future, hopefully by the time DS4 is old enough.

My DH is a GP who has seen enough HPV related cancers in young men to be utterly convinced that the NHS has got it wrong on this one. Rates of head and neck (HPV related) cancers in men have rise very dramatically in the last couple of decades, and HPV causes other male cancers too - it’s not just about cervical cancer.

Troubleindafamily

Oh and by the way , my son has been vaxxed.

"The hep B vaccine is a liver cancer prevention. Liver cancer is an awful way to die. Every child deserves a chance to avoid this - why would you withhold it from your child?"

This was one of the two vaccines we actually refused for DC, and the reason is that (at least at the time) there seemed to be a link between Hep B vaccine and later auto-immune conditions like Multiple Sclerosis.

That Hep B vaccine was recommended until 12 months, "before the myelin sheath sets" seemed to suggest a link to MS, too.

"So isn't the logical thing to test pregnant women for hep B and give the offspring of infected women this vaccine, rather than giving it to every single baby?... No. Hope this helps"

Actually, it doesn't.

Here in France, all pregnant women are tested for Hep B and offered a CS if they have it. I was surprised to hear that this test wasn't done in the UK when someone I know had a baby who caught Hep B during childbirth.

Hep B vaccine is now part of the NHS primary immunisation schedule - it has been added to the 5-in-1 vaccine.

More info here about the new schedule

Trouble - have some wholly inadequate . I had never heard of cancer of the tonsil before.

My daughter had the HPV vaccination 8 years ago - becoming unwell immediately after the first vaccination and much worse after the second vaccination (there were 3 jabs then and GP initially said symptoms were probably a virus) - she has not been well since. This case report published recently could have been written about her:

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0009922817728701?journalCode=cpja

We cannot be described as anti-vax (children had all their routine vaccinations and we took GPs advice on HPV).

This paper is from Japan and talks about the experiences there. The vaccination is not banned but has been withdrawn from the routine vaccination schedule and there is a class legal action taking place:

ijme.in/articles/lessons-learnt-in-japan-from-adverse-reactions-to-the-hpv-vaccine-a-medical-ethics-perspective/?galley=html

Safety signals have been raised to the European Medicines Agency and an investigation took place in 2015. The independent scientists at Nordic Cochrane made a complaint to the EU Ombudsman about the handling of the investigation and the complaint was rejected by the Ombudsman, but she would not look at scientific issues. Here is the Nordic Cochrane response:

nordic.cochrane.org/sites/nordic.cochrane.org/files/public/uploads/nordic_cochrane_views_on_the_ombudsmans_decision_2_nov_2017.pdf

Please bear in mind that there are ongoing health concerns in the press at the moment about other medical products where it has become evident that concerns raised by patients and denied by the government have subsequently been found to be substantiated.

@MyVisionsComeFromSoup - my daughter was diagnosed with POTS, but this was found to be autoimmune autonomic neuropathy (as in the case report I posted above) - it's a life long autoimmune disease, it is very disabling, she may never work. She may still get cervical cancer, as the jab only protects against 2 strains of HPV and there are many other high risk strains - the effect on the rate of cervical cancer (not on the incidence of lesions) will not be known for very many years.

The Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton published this paper recently which comments on risk:

www.ias.edu/ideas/2017/light-cervical-cancer

"Risk is much higher for poor girls and women. For example, a study in England found that 80 percent of cervical cancer incidence occurred in the bottom two-fifths of the population, while none occurred in the top fifth and 7 percent in the second fifth (Shack et al. 2008). This stark inequality echoes the global picture and calls for a biosocial approach to researching and testing medicines (Bruni et al. 2016). The chances of higher-risk serotypes leading to cancer seem to depend on several cofactors, such as impaired immune responses, which vary inversely with income, lifestyle risks, sexual activity, and frequency of reinfection (Cancer Treatment Centers of America 2017). Thus, framing HPV vaccination as a simple solution deflects attention away from these inequalities of risk between affluent women who have good immune responses, access to routine screening and good care, and poorer women who do not."

"Despite years of impressive research, uncertainties remain at multiple levels about how HPV infections cause cancer. There are more than one hundred HPV serotypes, and about twelve to fifteen are said to be high-risk. But the etiology of any HPV type is problematic, writes Dr. Robert Aronowitz, Professor and Chair of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania and also an experienced internist, “. . . as are causal claims based upon them, for example, the claim that HPV types 16 and 18 are the cause (his emphasis) of 70 percent of cervical cancer”(Wailoo et al. 2010). While numerous studies that show the vaccines are cost-effective assume they prevent cancer, independent critics point out we don’t know and “the real impact of HPV vaccination on cervical cancer will not be observable for decades” (Haug 2008)."

"We will not know for years how effectively HPV vaccines actually prevent cervical and related cancers or how the population of viral serotypes adapts."

Lol @ unanimous vote of muppetness! Awesome phrase.

As someone who got HPV and then had to have a LLETZ treatment for VAIN3 cell changes, I'm really pleased they've managed to develop a vaccine for it and that my daughter won't have to go through the fear I did (or worse). Vaccinations are a good thing. Glad you're feeling reassured now by this thread!

Please don't op.

I found out at my first smear I had hpv, had to have cells removed etc.

I'm fine now but obviously if the vaccine was available when I was younger I'd of had it .

All the women I know who have had cervical cancer started having sex at 13-14 and had had 7-10 different sexual partners by the age of 16.

Oh my, you've told the WHO this and they've changed their recommendations to just vaccinate "girls who are going to be sexually active young because we totally know who those are going to be at age 11/12"
You're a cancer researcher are you? Published these astonishing findings?
Oh you're BETTER than a cancer researcher because you KNEW SOME PEOPLE. Thought so.

All the women I know who have had cervical cancer started having sex at 13-14 and had had 7-10 different sexual partners by the age of 16

“All the women I know” isn’t exactly medical proof is it? My mum was a virgin until she married my dad at 27, so was he. She never smoked, led a healthy life, barely drank and certainly never cheated on my dad. She died of cervical cancer.

" the vaccine doesn't protect against all strains. That's true. But it does protect against two cancer causing strains."

DD's paediatrician advised us to wait a bit, until Gardasil 9 comes on the market in 2018 (and I will wait for another year or two until side effects would be seen).

Gardasil 9 is "for the prevention of cervical, vulvar, vaginal, and anal cancers caused by human papillomavirus (HPV) Types 16, 18, 31, 33, 45, 52, and 58 ; precancerous or dysplastic lesions caused by HPV Types 6, 11, 16, 18, 31, 33, 45, 52, and 58 ; and genital warts caused by HPV Types 6 and 11.

I know in my head that the stories I've read are just the very, very few that went wrong out of millions

The stories you have read are just stories. There are people campaigning against this vaccine with no science, no proof, nothing but rumour and conjecture on their side. I know of one woman campaigning saying that her daughter got sick after the vaccine and that she knows for a fact it was the vaccine. Her doctors, her family, everyone who knows her knows that her daughters illness is a result of years of untreated serious bulimia. She sounds very plausible to strangers though.

Do the right thing.

YANBU OP & in your position I would listen to your gut feeling.

Vaccinations are right up there with Brexit in that there is only one acceptable opinion on Mumsnet and other views will be shouted down immediately.
They are all opinions although the pro-vacciners will hold up research conducted by the pharmaceutical companies as evidence that their product is both safe and necessary.
Likewise the herd immunity targets of the government do not mean that it is necessarily best for your own child.