A GIRL who died shortly after being given a cervical cancer vaccine had a “serious underlying medical condition”, an British NHS Trust said last night.
NHS Coventry said the vaccination was “most unlikely to have caused the death” of Natalie Morton (14) and that a preliminary postmortem revealed that she had a serious underlying medical condition which was likely to have caused her death.
Yesterday British health authorities ordered that a batch of the vaccinations linked to the death of Natalie Morton be quarantined until safety checks are completed.
However, the UK department of health’s director of immunisations, Prof David Salisbury, said: “No link can be made between the death and the vaccine until all the facts are known and a postmortem takes place.”
The Irish Medicines Board (IMB) confirmed yesterday that the batch quarantined in the UK had not been distributed to the Irish market.
On Monday, Natalie Morton died within hours of being given GlaxoSmithKline’s Cervarix vaccine at the Blue Coat School in Coventry as part of the UK’s national HPV vaccination programme. Three other pupils were sent home after they began to feel unwell, the national health service said.
The IMB said it had to date received eight reports of adverse reactions to the cervical cancer vaccine. Just one of those was regarding Cervarix. The other seven involved Gardasil, manufactured by Merck Co.
It stressed there had been no fatalities associated with use of HPV vaccines in Ireland to date. Reactions reported have included dizziness, tingling sensation, gastrointestinal symptoms such as abdominal pain and vomiting, fainting, allergy-type effects (eyelid swelling, chest tightness), lymph gland enlargement and hair loss.
The UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency said that almost 5,000 cases of side effects have been reported, including dizziness and nausea, though it said the GlaxoSmithKline product had a good safety record. The UK is the only country to have picked GlaxoSmithKline’s Cervarix for mass vaccinations over Gardasil, which is a more expensive vaccine made by Merck. It also protects against strains of human papillomavirus (HPV) virus which cause genital warts.
In October last year, 12-year-old Ashleigh Cave became ill just 30 minutes after getting the vaccine at a school in Liverpool, and became paralysed from the waist down. She has spent almost all of the time since in hospital.
More than 1.4 million vaccinations have been given in the UK in the last year, although the numbers applying for it increased this year once it emerged that celebrity TV star Jade Goody was dying of cervical cancer.
There was a public outcry last year when Minister for Health Mary Harney announced that plans for a national cervical cancer vaccination programme in the Republic were being shelved for the time being because the country could not afford it. The estimated cost was around €10 million. As a result the vaccine can only be obtained privately in Ireland.