COLOMBIA NEWS (Reuters) — Confusion and panic is mounting in the northern Colombian town of Carmen de Bolivar where over the past three months more than 300 girls have come down with an unknown illness.
Local hospitals have been flooded with girls ranging from 9-19 years old with symptoms including fainting, headaches, and numbness of the hands.
All the sick girls, however, have received Gardasil vaccinations in recent months. Gardasil is a popular vaccine used to prevent cervical cancer and there was fear that a presence of lead in the vaccine could be causing the mystery illness. But test results reveal no trace of the potentially poisonous chemical element.
The parents aren’t yet consumed by the source of the outbreak.
“We are very worried parents, desperate parents, who want our daughters to get healthy, to get back to how they were before, a few months ago. We want our daughters to stop losing weight, to be able to get out of bed, stop being bedridden so they can get out of their chairs because they can’t walk,” said Yadira Cortes, a mother of one of the sick girls.
Amid the confusion, doctors are scrambling for other explanations.
During a visit to Carmen de Bolivar on Monday (September 8) Health Minister Alejandro Gaviria was primarily concerned with the general suffering.
“More than just determining if what is happening is caused by the vaccine or not, this community is suffering. It has a real problem and needs assistance not just for one day but permanently, and this perhaps is the first point because if all of us focus on the diagnosis of whether or not it is the vaccine we aren’t going to move forward either, independently of what happens here the ministry has to act, has to act starting now which is what we are doing,” he said.
Some have publicly come forward to chalk up the illness to a case of mass hysteria, a diagnosis that has angered parents of the sick girls.
Dr. Rodrigo Cordoba, president of the Latin American Psychiatry Association, said some of the girls could be part of a mass ‘mirror’ phenomenon. But, he added, that doesn’t change the existence of the symptoms or mean everyone is a faking it.
“The vaccine ends up being a fact, an explosive symbolic fact, that is to say. All of the examinations that they have carried out in relation to the vaccine regarding the vaccine’s characteristics such as its application, there is no evidence that shows that there is a direct relation [between symptoms and the vaccine]. That is not to say that the girls are not sick but the reality of these characteristics is a sensation of fear, apprehension, some physical manifestations that generate a mass phenomenon, a mirror phenomenon that is generalized and there are emotional manifestations that have a somatic expression, they are expressed in the body and obviously spread these kinds of manifestations and bring the consequences that we have seen,” said Cordoba in Bogota.
While not life-threatening, medical authorities continue to search for answers as to what is making hundreds of girls in Carmen de Bolivar sick.
