<img alt=“hpv.jpg” src=“https://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/hpv.jpg” width=“180” height=“180” align=“right” border=0 hspace=“10px”/>
UPDATE – 30/9:Caron Grainger, joint director of public health for NHS Coventry and Coventry City Council, has released the following statement: “The preliminary post mortem results have revealed a rare serious underlying medical condition which was likely to have caused death. We are awaiting further test results which will take some time. However indications are that it was most unlikely that the HPV vaccination was the cause of death.”
Britain is bracing for another health scare over vaccines after a 14-year old girl died following injection with a human papillomavirus jab.
Natalie Morton died on Monday after receiving Cervarix at a school in Coventry.
“The incident happened shortly after the girl had received her HPV Vaccine in the school,” Caron Grainger, joint director of public health for NHS Coventry and Coventry City Council (press statements). “No link can be made between the death and the vaccine until all the facts are known and a post mortem takes place.”
Pim Kon, medical director of Cevarix-manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline, said the batch of vaccine used in this case had been quarantined as a precautionary measure. “We are working with the Department of Health and MHRA to better understand this case, as at this stage the exact cause of this tragic death is unknown,” says Kon (press release pdf).
The HPV vaccine, which protects against cervical cancer, has already been controversial due to its being protective against sexually transmitted infection being perceived in some quarters as encouraging promiscuity. Some newspapers in the UK, perhaps mindful of the their role in the MMR vaccine scandal, are already playing safe, and reassuring their readers that it is too early to judge what caused this death.
Stoking the fires though, the Guardian writes:
Vaccine opponents are now vocal in all western countries and the internet is full of their doubts, criticisms and conspiracy theories. But last month, doubts were voiced in a more mainstream medical forum, with the publication of a US government report in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Jama). It cited 32 deaths linked to the cervical cancer vaccine, none of which has been confirmed. It also said the vaccine has been associated with higher incidents of fainting and blood clots than other vaccines.
For starters the JAMA study was about Merck’s vaccine Gardasil, not about GSK’s Cevarix. And it certainly didn’t cite “32 deaths linked to the cervical cancer vaccine”. Here’s what it actually said:
Eight of the reports were second-hand reports that could not be verified. Four were manufacturer reports with no identifying information for confirmation or medical review. Twenty of the reports (62.5%) could be verified through clinical review of medical records and autopsy reports. Of these cases, 14 (70%) were after qHPV alone. The other 6 cases reported qHPV as well as a variety of other vaccines.
Parents are voicing concerns though, and threatening to keep their children unvaccinated; see for instance the comments section of the Daily Mail story on this death.
Putting things in perspective (via comments distributed by the Science Media Centre) is Malcolm McCrae, a virologist at the University of Warwick, who notes, “As with any medical intervention, vaccines are no different in the sense that one can, on rare occasions, see tragic consequences. But overall this is an extremely well tested vaccine which has been produced in response to a critical health issue – cervical cancer, a disease responsible for almost one thousand deaths annually in the UK.”
Image: ‘electron micrograph of a negatively stained human papilloma virus’ / NCI