Other petitions included one for intensified government efforts to identify causes of the side effects, including convulsions, seizures, severe headaches and even partial paralysis, and to find therapeutic remedies. On June 15, the ministry told local governments to suspend recommending that girls aged 12 to 16 be given injections of the vaccines Cervarix or Gardasil, citing a possible link between chronic adverse reactions and the vaccines. Local governments, acting on behalf of the central government, had issued the notices recommending teenage girls be vaccinated.

In April, the Diet revised the Preventive Vaccination Law to offer free vaccine injections to girls aged 14-18.

However, an advisory panel to the ministry subsequently advised that the recommendation that teenage girls be vaccinated be suspended after it analyzed cases of schoolgirls who developed chronic pain after vaccination and concluded the symptoms appeared to be the result of the vaccination. The ministry complied with the advice.

During Friday’s meeting with Tamura, the schoolgirls, their parents and the association asked the government to revise the vaccination law again to remove cervical cancer vaccines from the list of vaccines the central government subsidizes.

A 17-year-old senior high school student from Yokohama told reporters:


“There is not a single moment when I am not suffering pain and I want the government to find a remedy.”

“I do not want the government to resume recommending this vaccine,” said the girl, who was administered a third Cervarix injection in April 2011. She now suffers severe pains throughout her body including her head, she said.

A 16-year-old, wheelchair-confined senior high school girl whose hands and legs convulsed during both the meeting with the minister and the news conference, said:


“There must be numerous girls who are suffering symptoms similar to mine without knowing their conditions stem from the vaccines.” “I took this action (of talking to the press) as I want those girls to become aware of the link” between the vaccines and their disorders, she said.

Toshie Ikeda, a Hino City assembly legislator who has served as the secretary general of the association and accompanied the victims to Friday’s meeting with Tamura, quoted the health minister as telling the victims,


“I am aware of the necessity of creating a team to study this problem and gather information on the actual state of damage that has been inflicted nationwide.”

Matsufuji, whose daughter is among the four in wheelchairs, quoted Tamura as telling the petitioners that the government will decide how to respond after completing its investigation.

Sotaro Sato, a medical doctor who has examined many cervical vaccine victims, told the news conference the convulsions, inability to walk, and involuntary movements of hands and toes were caused by encephalomyelitis, or inflammation of the brain and spinal code.


“Cervical cancer vaccines, which are chemically bound to special types of adjuvants, often trigger encephalomyelitis,” he said.

“Since the vaccines cause autoantibodies against the brain’s neuronal fibers to be produced in many cases, they have triggered demyelinating disorders,” he said, adding they have also induced many cases of cerebral vasculitis.

In a cerebral vasculitis, the body’s immune system attacks blood vessels in the brain, often leading to brain hemorrhage, said Sato, who runs a hospital in Osaki, Miyagi Prefecture.

In 2009, the ministry approved the marketing in Japan of Cervarix sold by GlaxoSmithKlein plc. of Britain. Then in 2011, the marketing of Gardasil by Merck Sharp & Dohme, known as Merck & Co. in the United States, was approved.

The ministry says it received a total of 1,968 reports of adverse reactions among the 3.28 million girls who have been vaccinated as of March 31. The association says the number represents a tip of the iceberg.

Ikeda said doctors often reject pleas by parents of victims to file reports about adverse reactions, which are needed to obtain compensation from the government, either due to awareness of their responsibility for the results of vaccines they injected or lack of knowledge of the vaccines’ side effects.