Colombia Has Over 200 Adolescent Girls [struck By Unknown Disease]

2023 Author: Abraham Higgins | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-11-27 23:16

Colombia has over 200 adolescent girls [struck by unknown disease]

In the small town of El Carmen de Bolivar in northern Colombia, more than 200 adolescent girls have been struck by an unknown disease. The first cases of the disease appeared at the end of May and since then their number has increased dramatically. In the last weekend alone, 120 girls aged 9 to 16 were admitted to local hospitals. Symptoms include numbness in the hands and headache.

Schoolchildren El Carmen de Bolivar. Photo from the site elcarmen-bolivar.gov.co /

In the small town of El Carmen de Bolivar in northern Colombia, more than 200 adolescent girls were struck by an unknown illness, the Associated Press reported.

According to the mayor of the city, whose population is 95 thousand people, the first cases of the disease appeared at the end of May and since then their number has increased dramatically. Over the past weekend alone, 120 girls between the ages of 9 and 16 were admitted to local hospitals, exhausting the region's already limited healthcare options. Symptoms of the disease include complaints of numbness in the hands and headache, are not life-threatening, and resolve on their own over time.

Meanwhile, the girls 'parents say their daughters' illness is a reaction to the Gardasil vaccine against the human papillomavirus. On August 27, local residents held a peaceful march demanding a comprehensive investigation of what was happening.

The Colombian authorities have already sent a team of doctors and toxicologists to El Carmen de Bolivar to investigate the underlying causes of the disease. Colombian Health Minister Alejandro Gaviria has criticized Colombian media "panic", suggesting that what is happening in El Carmen de Bolivar may be a rare case of mass hysteria. The minister dismissed the possibility of a link between the Gardasil vaccination that protects against cervical cancer, to which 2.9 million Colombian women have already undergone, and the mysterious state of adolescent girls. “On the one hand, we have the power of scientific evidence, and on the other, rumors and prejudices,” Gaviria said on a local radio, reporting that around 3,000 women die from cervical cancer in the country every year.

Veronica Trulin, spokesman for the vaccine-producing pharmaceutical company Merck in Latin America, said that all batches of the drug, including those sent to Colombia, meet all quality and safety standards.

It is worth noting that cases of mass diseases of adolescent girls of nature unknown to science are not so rare. So, in January 2012, symptoms similar to those of Tourette's syndrome appeared at almost the same time in 12 schoolgirls from Le Roy, New York. All of the patients were eventually diagnosed with conversion disorder. The development of such disorders is often associated with the transferred stress. In this case, symptoms characteristic of a somatic (bodily) disease arise, which in fact are not detected. Manifestations of mass hysteria in patients may include impaired vision and speech, a feeling of numbness in the limbs, and other neurological symptoms.