HPV Vaccine should i consent for my 12 year old be given this?

[Rewy]

A little concerned regarding the decision on this as there does seem to be some worrying side effects .

"Hakluyt, I asked you earlier if you would be along to help me when my child needs 24 hour care caused by a vaccine, given to stop them passing a. disease onto someone else. You declined to answer. Shall I take that as a "no" then?"

Would you be along to help me if my child needed 24 hour care caused by a disease allowed to reestqblish itself because your failure to vaccinate damaged herd immunity?

Thanks SideofFoot.

Hakluyt. Sure. DD reacted at the time to her DTP jabs with increasingly serious local reactions. Stupidly (and on the advice of our then doctor) we gave her the full course. With the third injection she lost consciousness and was unrousable for about 6 hours. Her thigh (the injection site) was so swollen it was nearly doubled in size, it was very red and hot to touch with a large hard nodule where the needle had gone in. Apparently this is typical of aluminium sensitivity. When DD came to (in the hospital) she woke up screaming. They said this was to be expected and that she would settle by the following day. She was never the same again.

She went from being a normal baby who fed well and slept really well for her age to having terrible sleep, crying constantly, her body was covered in eczema, she stopped gaining weight, her feet were blue, she vomited most of the milk she took in, had breathing difficulties and terrible diarrhoea. She was diagnosed as failure to thrive and at one point we had to wear masks as the doctors said that a bout of flu, gastric illness or otherwise would kill her.

We went from doctor to doctor and hospital to hospital but she just got sicker. Finally it turned out that she had developed multiple allergies, her immune system was shot and she was reacting to foods in my breast milk. She continued to have multiple severe allergies for years - we went on a strict elimination diet (with a doctor) and at one point she was only eating 7 foods. She also suffers from convulsions.

She is 10 now and doing pretty well. We have worked very hard to try to restore her health. She still has immune issues and it is always stressful when she gets ill.

Our doctor agrees that the vaccine damaged her immune system.

And when I say that you are on your own, what I mean is that the majority of the medical community don't have a clue how to help you and most want to tell you that it is all just a coincidence. I still have that happen to me today.

I live in France where vaccination is required for school attendance. Every year I get hassled over my DDs incomplete vaccination. By law I have to meet with a school inspecting doctor. I tell them that DD had a vaccine reaction and they look at me like this . Then I hand over the hospital report - that soon shuts any school doctor or nurse up. None of them want to come near DD with a needle after they read it.

I am so very sorry about your daughter. I don't really see how this debate can continue now. Anything I would want to say would seem inappropriate in the circumstances.

Thank you Hakluyt. I mean for being sorry about my DD.

I have no wish to shut down this discussion. I really don't. I just don't like people blithely talking about risk/benefit ratios, vanishingly small risks, etc in a way that makes out that we have actual concrete info on these things. We just don't.

I was like most of the people on this thread, of course I was going to have my child vaccinated. I had read a bit about it, everyone knows that vaccines are really safe and that they are a miracle of modern science, saving lives and doing good. And then my world came crashing down.

I'm just saying that it happens. It happens to real people and devastates their lives. We are lucky, my DD had a bad reaction but it could have been so much worse.

The problem with vaccination is that we don't know in advance who is going to react badly and little is being done to improve our knowledge in this area. Thankfully most kids seem to have vaccines and be fine with them. But some don't and when it goes wrong it goes badly wrong.

I think HPV vaccines haven't been tested thoroughly enough and I'm very concerned that the reports of serious adverse events don't seem to be adequately investigated. I also think that their benefits with regards to actually preventing cancer are unknown. It is impossible for anyone to do an accurate risk/benefit analysis for their child. That is not good enough for me. My children will not be having this vaccine.

I totally respect the rights of others to have the vaccine and you can discuss it all you like here, it is no skin off my nose and I've been on enough vaccine threads on MN that I don't take much personally so there is no need to feel that anything you post may seem inappropriate with regards to my family.

I just urge people to proceed with caution and read up as much as they can. Of course no matter how much you read that probably won't tell you if your child is in the majority who will be fine or not. And I do believe that most children are ok. Having said that we currently have no concrete information on the long term outcomes for HPV vaccines. For me there are too many unknowns with these vaccines and I find it appalling that they are being touted as preventing cancer when we don't yet actually know if that is true or not.

Please don't mind me and carry on the discussion. I'm absolutely not personally invested in it - my kids won't be having this particular jab.

Beachcomber, I've come across thread before in which you talk about your DD and I am so very sorry that she was so affected and she and you have to deal with the fall-out .

You are right, none of us can know with any degree of certainty whether one of our children will be one of the few adversely affected by a vaccine.
Just like there is really no way of knowing whether our child would be badly affected a childhood infection.

It is very interesting, that say, chickenpox is on the routine vaccination schedule in the States (compulsory vaccinations before school entry in many states), and it is not here.
The vaccination schedules for infants and children here, in France and in Germany differ. There will be reasons for that (which I do not know).
There is far more about immunological process in our bodies that we don't know about than that we do IYKWIM.

So, yes, every vaccination is a leap of faith.
And anybody who has made the kind of experience you have or similar, will perfectly understandably have huge reservations and may opt out.
For me, the risk/benefit assessment means that all my children have been/will be vaccinated.

I think what upsets me is not a rational discussion about the great unknowns, but the fear mongering that some people are guilty of (here, in RL and in the media). The fact is that the multiple of anecdote is not data; the fact that my boys have been fine with their vaccinations so far proves not more than that your DD was not .

Until we have a way of predicting how an individual will react to any given vaccine the known risks of some diseases and my willingness to contribute to herd immunity outweigh the unpredictable risks. For me.

Thank you PacificDogwood.

Sorry about the quick post and run the other day. Was heading away for the weekend. Yes, the link was for Pacific. :)

I think Beach has said everything that needs to be said.