Scores of teenage girls have been hospitalized due to a mystery illness in the small town of northern Colombia, with fearful parents claiming it to be an adverse reaction to a popular vaccine against cervical cancer, the Associated Press reported. However, none of their symptoms were life-threatening and all have since been released.
In a town of 95,000 near Colombia's Caribbean coast, more than 200 girls in El Carmen de Bolivar have been infected with a mystery disease, the symptoms ranging from fainting to numbness in the hands and headaches, authorities said, shooting down allegations that the disease could be a rare case of mass hysteria.
But since all the girls, between the ages of 9 and 16, were injected with the vaccine Gardasil in recent months, parents have been up in arms. On Wednesday, residents marched peacefully to demand a thorough investigation.
The mystery illness, which appeared at the end of May, has steadily been increasing since then, Francisco Vega, the town's mayor and a trained physician, told the AP.
Over the weekend, 120 girls were rushed to hospitals, collapsing the town's limited medical facilities. However, "echoing the assurances of national health and toxicology experts, who have traveled to the town to collect blood samples and investigate possible environmental hazards, Vega said there's no evidence the vaccine, which has undergone extensive testing and regulation globally, is to blame."
Meanwhile, the panic-stricken coverage by the media has been criticized by Health Minister Alejandro Gaviria, who said concerns about their vaccine, which has been applied to 2.9 million women in Colombia, are baseless.
"On one side we have the weight of scientific evidence and on the other are opinions and moral prejudices," he told W Radio on Wednesday, adding the cervical cancer claims the lives of more than 3,000 women every year in Colombia.
Veronica Trulin, head of communications in Latin America for Merck, said lots of the vaccine, including the ones sent to Colombia, meets all required quality and safety standards, according to the AP.
"We don't comment on speculation about our products," she said in an email.
