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No increased risk of chronic fatigue syndrome after HPV vaccination

Londinium

Senior Member
Messages
178
Girls receiving one or more doses of HPV vaccine have no greater risk of chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis (CFS / ME) than unvaccinated girls. This is shown in a new major study from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

The study is part of the national surveillance of the HPV vaccination programme and includes data from more than 175,000 girls in the first six birth cohorts who were offered the vaccine in 7th grade. 145,000 of these received one or more doses of HPV vaccine.

"This is a major study where we have investigated the association between HPV vaccination and chronic fatigue syndrome. The incidence of this disease has increased in Norway, but we found no association with HPV vaccination," says first author of the study, Berit Feiring from the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Modelling at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is a virus that can cause infection in the cervix. Persistent HPV infection is a necessary cause of cervical cancer.

The HPV vaccine Gardasil protects against 4 different HPV genotypes (6, 11, 16 and 18) and has been offered to girls in 7th grade since 2009.

Information about CFS / ME and other diagnoses from the Norwegian Patient Registry (NPR) was linked with information about HPV vaccination from the Norwegian Immunisation Registry (SYSVAK).

The study has adjusted for factors that may affect the association between vaccination and CFS / ME, such as region of residence, country background, parental education and previous hospital visits among the girls.

https://www.fhi.no/en/news/2017/No-increased-risk-CFS-HPV-vaccine/


Full paper published in Vaccine, here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X17308083
 
Messages
6
Sadly this study looked at parents educational history but not at medical history.

It would have been good to see if medical history of ME in families changed the risk of developing ME from the vaccine.

They say themselves in the paper that people more at risk might be avoiding the vaccine and changing the statistics.

Plus looking at the tables I don't understand how the obvious increase in cases in vaccinated girls doesn't show a statistical increased risk?
 

Londinium

Senior Member
Messages
178
Plus looking at the tables I don't understand how the obvious increase in cases in vaccinated girls doesn't show a statistical increased risk?

Simply because you see a statistically similar increase in unvaccinated boys, suggesting either increased diagnosis of ME/CFS or increased prevalence due to factors unrelated to vaccination. Similar to the MMR scare*, in which an increased cases of autism coinciding with the introduction of the triple vaccine were also seen in countries that didn't introduce it, providing strong evidence that correlation did not prove causation.



*also due to the bloody Lancet. Why is it always The Lancet??!
 

Deepwater

Senior Member
Messages
208
Yeah right.

HPV vaccine is dangerous.

When I was telling my story of vaccine-related onset of ME last year to a very sceptical nurse, she started to look a little unsure and whispered to me that the girls at her daughter's school had just had the HPV vaccine and the parents of two of the girls were claiming their daughters had then developed CFS. She clearly hadn't believed them before. . . .
 

Marigold7

Senior Member
Messages
430
When I was telling my story of vaccine-related onset of ME last year to a very sceptical nurse, she started to look a little unsure and whispered to me that the girls at her daughter's school had just had the HPV vaccine and the parents of two of the girls were claiming their daughters had then developed CFS. She clearly hadn't believed them before. . . .

I had not seen it described as post vaccine CFS before. Would that alone skew stats given that so many GPs in the Uk and Ireland still do no recognise ME? ie take other side effects out of the stats?
 

RogerBlack

Senior Member
Messages
902
There is no especial reason to believe that HPV infection itself will not precipitate CFS in some fraction of patients.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26475444

Pandemic flu certainly does, while vaccination does not.

On things the vaccine for HPV is doing. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26829924 - for example.
It is too soon to see impacts of this vaccine on head and neck, cervical and anal cancer, however, "Admission rates per 100,000 population in females (for genital warts) aged 10-19 years (predominantly vaccinated at school), reduced from 42.2 to 6.0".

This is an early sign that HPV related cancers in this group will likely track this downward decline.
I do wonder what use of data from the registry could show for longitudinal studies on the progress of patients with 'just' CFS.

A circulating virus around the school at the time of vaccination could certainly cause CFS.
Back of the envelope calculations (too tired for proper ones) indicate that about 1/5th of large secondary schools (1500 pupils) will have two girls come down with CFS in any particular 3 month period.
 
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Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,820
If you look at the incidence of ME/CFS by age graph from Fig 1 of the "twin peaks" study, you can see that the first major peak in the incidence of ME/CFS occurs at around the ages of 12 to 18. So just as the HPV vaccine is given (it is usually given to girls when they reach the age of 11 or 12), you naturally hit a major peak in ME/CFS incidence anyway.

This may explain why this vaccine has been associated with ME/CFS in the minds of the parents of the children affected.


Incidence of ME/CFS by Age
Twin peaks in ME:CFS onset age.jpg

The CDC say they recommend the HPV vaccine to be given to girls when they reach 11 to 12 year olds; but they say it can be given to girls at the age of 9.

If the vaccine were given to 9 years old, you might find that the reports of ME/CFS appearing after vaccination were much lower, because at age 9, children have not quite entered into the age range where ME/CFS incidence naturally shoots up.



That being said, Dr John Chia's investigations into the medical histories of 200 of his ME/CFS patients found that 3 of 200 appeared to be a post-vaccination onset (after pneumovax, MMR, and influenza vaccines). Ref: 1
 
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Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,820
As an aside: I have just now noticed something interesting in that in graph: although we know ME/CFS tends to be around 4 times more prevalent in females compared to males, the incidence of ME/CFS in that graph is around the same for both boys and girls younger than the age of 10.

But from the age of 10 and higher, that's when the gender difference in incidence of ME/CFS appears in the graph.

Now it just so happens that girls hit puberty at around the age of 10 and 14, and female puberty is driven by estrogen and progesterone. (Boys hit puberty slightly later, at 12 to 16).

So this perhaps suggests that the reason females are much more likely to get ME/CFS relates to estrogen or progesterone, rather than any other differences in anatomy or physiology between females and males.
 

Deepwater

Senior Member
Messages
208
There is no especial reason to believe that HPV infection itself will not precipitate CFS in some fraction of patients.


Back of the envelope calculations (too tired for proper ones) indicate that about 1/5th of large secondary schools (1500 pupils) will have two girls come down with CFS in any particular 3 month period.

This is based, I presume, on assuming even distribution of incidence over time. Has anyone ever conducted a study, based on actual dates patients claimed to have become sick, not dates of eventual diagnosis by doctor, looking at correlation between dates of disease onset and dates of vaccination?
Perhaps vaccine damage is rather like M.E. itself, both being ideas to which the medical establishment has been hostile, maybe until it happens to oneself. . . .
 

Hip

Senior Member
Messages
17,820
Has anyone ever conducted a study, based on actual dates patients claimed to have become sick, not dates of eventual diagnosis by doctor, looking at correlation between dates of disease onset and dates of vaccination?

Yes, I have always thought this would be a good idea. To make such a study even more incisive, it could focus only on ME/CFS patients with sudden-onset ME/CFS (sudden onset occurs literally within days: one moment you are perfectly healthy, and 3 days later you have full ME/CFS).

Then if it could be shown that an inordinate amount of sudden onset cases appeared just days after vaccination, that would indicate a causal connection.

Although even if such a study found such a causal connection, it would not necessarily prove that vaccines increase the risk of ME/CFS, because it is possible that there might be a latent tendency to develop ME/CFS which is triggered by the vaccine, but this ME/CFS may have later appeared anyway, in due course.

For example, if you have metal fatigue in bridge say, that bridge might collapse when a very heavy truck drives over it. But that bridge would have collapsed anyway one day, because of the metal fatigue. So it was not really the truck that broke the bridge, it was the metal fatigue.

In the case of vaccines triggering ME/CFS, the same might be the case; the vaccine plays the role of the heavy truck, but a latent weakness in that individual which predisposes them to ME/CFS might have been present anyway, so their ME/CFS might have later appeared even without any vaccination.

So you would still need other studies which look at the overall prevalence in ME/CFS in vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.
 
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RogerBlack

Senior Member
Messages
902
So you would still need other studies which look at the overall prevalence in ME/CFS in vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.

The above mentioned pandemic flu vaccination study did that. They did not assume a narrow time window.

Plus, you have the possibility that being vaccinated _lowers_ your rate of CFS - as it would have for those in the vaccinated for pandemic flu group who were exposed, compared to those who were exposed to pandemic flu and went on to develop CFS.
 
Messages
15,786
One possibility is that the vaccine is triggering ME/CFS, in people who otherwise would have it triggered later by something else.

So it might not be that the disease is actually caused by the vaccine, but rather the disease is already present, albeit latent, until the HPV vaccine or another immune trigger comes along. Hence we might see more people getting it from that vaccine, who otherwise would have gotten it a few months or years later from EBV or something else. There'd be no real change in prevalence rates, but maybe a mild change in the age of onset.
 
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RogerBlack

Senior Member
Messages
902
One possibility is that the vaccine is triggering in ME/CFS, in people who otherwise would have it triggered later by something else.

So it might not be that the disease is actually caused by the vaccine, but rather the disease is already present, albeit latent, until the HPV vaccine or another immune trigger comes along. Hence we might see more people getting it from that vaccine, who otherwise would have gotten it a few months or years later from EBV or something else. There'd be no real change in prevalence rates, but maybe a mild change in the age of onset.

If the vaccine (or infection) was triggering a change in the onset, then you'd see a spike, followed by a dip, followed by a return to normal rate.
The CFS graph over time did not show this in the case of either vaccinated or unvaccinated pandemic flu cases.
(clearly, that was for one vaccine)
 

HowToEscape?

Senior Member
Messages
626
Semi anecdote: I requested the HPV vaccine from my doctor but he he said that since I had an immune disorder (this disease) he did not want to provide it.

OTOH, if I didn't have an immune malfunction, it would be protective against getting sick later. A tiny dose of a weakened form of the disease sure beats getting the live, virulent infection, one which apparently doesn't clear but instead makes a permanent home in your body.
 
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Deepwater

Senior Member
Messages
208
One possibility is that the vaccine is triggering ME/CFS, in people who otherwise would have it triggered later by something else.

So it might not be that the disease is actually caused by the vaccine, but rather the disease is already present, albeit latent, until the HPV vaccine or another immune trigger comes along. Hence we might see more people getting it from that vaccine, who otherwise would have gotten it a few months or years later from EBV or something else. There'd be no real change in prevalence rates, but maybe a mild change in the age of onset.

I'm sure you don't mean to suggest that it doesn't matter if we give vulnerable individuals vaccines that bring on problems such as ME earlier in life than they would otherwise have suffered them.
There is also the question of severity. I first developed ME from EBV, but it was fairly mild, bar occasional brief crashes, until the day following the Hep A vaccine. That did something else entirely to my system from which it has never ever recovered.
I must say I'm sceptical of the inevitability theory anyway, because this disease seems to have been rare at one time, and never had this prevalence amongst teenage girls even in the days when I first came down with it.
And, perhaps to say the unsayable, the suicide rate amongst people with ME is testimony to the fact that for many it is worse than being dead, worse, in other words, than cancer.
 

charles shepherd

Senior Member
Messages
2,239
I'm sure you don't mean to suggest that it doesn't matter if we give vulnerable individuals vaccines that bring on problems such as ME earlier in life than they would otherwise have suffered them.
There is also the question of severity. I first developed ME from EBV, but it was fairly mild, bar occasional brief crashes, until the day following the Hep A vaccine. That did something else entirely to my system from which it has never ever recovered.
I must say I'm sceptical of the inevitability theory anyway, because this disease seems to have been rare at one time, and never had this prevalence amongst teenage girls even in the days when I first came down with it.
And, perhaps to say the unsayable, the suicide rate amongst people with ME is testimony to the fact that for many it is worse than being dead, worse, in other words, than cancer.


General information from the MEA on vaccines and ME/CFS

Anecdotal evidence indicates that a number of vaccinations are occasionally capable of either triggering ME/CFS, or causing an exacerbation of pre-existing symptoms, and the UK CMO Working Group report acknowledged (in section 3.3.2) that vaccinations can occasionally act as a trigger factor in the development of ME/CFS. The CMO report can be e-accessed using the document archive on the MEA website: www.meassociation.org.uk

The link is biologically plausible but there hasn't been any really robust research carried out to investigate the role of vaccinations as immune system stressors in the causation of ME/CFS.

Two fairly recent published reports of interest relate to an MHRA review of HPV vaccine (Cervarix) and ME/CFS >>

http://www.mhra.gov.uk/NewsCentre/Pressreleases/CON316330

and two case reports re Swine Flu vaccine and ME/CFS:

http://www.meassociation.org.uk/201...accination-bmj-rapid-responses-21-march-2014/

I have a longstanding interest in the role of vaccinations in ME/CFS and my patient evidence on the subject, which is now quite substantial and includes a number of health workers who were vaccinated almost as a condition of employment, indicates that hepatitis B vaccine appears to play an unusual and significant role here

This is supported by the results of the MEA website poll on the roll of vaccinations as trigger factors for ME/CFS (see below)

The MEA has an information leaflet which summaries the research evidence relating to vaccinations and ME/CFS.

Similar information is summarised and referenced on page 41 of the MEA purple booklet.

MEA WEBSITE POLL:



  • If your ME/CFS was triggered by a vaccination, which vaccine was involved?
    • Hepatitis B (57%, 338 Votes)

    • Flu (9%, 51 Votes)

    • Other (7%, 41 Votes)

    • BCG (6%, 33 Votes)

    • Cannot remember (5%, 31 Votes)

    • Combination (5%, 27 Votes)

    • Tetanus (3%, 18 Votes)

    • Meningitis (3%, 17 Votes)

    • MMR (2%, 14 Votes)

    • Polio (2%, 10 Votes)

    • Hepatitis A (1%, 7 Votes)

    • Typhoid (0%, 4 Votes)


      Total Voters: 591
Start Date: April 30, 2010 @ 3:20 pm
End Date: June 2, 2010 @ 3:20 pm