How terrified would you be if your ordinarily active, healthy teen daughter woke up from a nap one day with symptoms of Tourette's Syndrome? How much more terrified would you be if the same thing happened to 11 other girls from your daughter's high school ... and no one could explain why? As a parent I'd be scared, no doubt about it, but more than anything else, I'd be desperate for answers and furious that I wasn't getting any.
That's what moms Melissa Phillip and Elizabeth Miller want: Answers. And I don't blame them. Phillip's daughter Thera Sanchez and Miller's daughter Katie Krautwurst are 2 of the 13 students at LeRoy Junior-Senior High School in upstate New York to develop a mysterious movement disorder, seemingly overnight. Their daily lives are now plagued with a host of tics and stuttering and outbursts that have forced them to give up all the things they used to love doing, from art to cheerleading to simply attending school.
Coincidence? I think not. Yet officials insist they've found no connection between the cases.
Okay, moms, question: How many of you would settle for that explanation?
Exactly. None of you would, because what the school and the NY Department of Health told Phillip, Sanchez, and the other parents can't even be considered an explanation. Authorities say each girl has undergone the same type of testing; parents say that's simply not true -- treatment has been individualized. Parents have also been assured of extensive environmental testing. Says Dr. Gregory Young of the NY DoH:
“We have conclusively ruled out any form of infection or communicable disease and there’s no evidence of any environmental factor."
But parents say they've received no test results, no data, no proof of any kind that the above is true. And I don't see how it possibly could be true. Sure, the illness might be "stress-induced," as the girls' individual physicians have suggested. But even if that is the case, as a parent, I would still want answers: How much academic or social pressure was my kid under in the first place for her body to react in such an extreme manner?
So far, these parents' questions continue to go unanswered. And so, their children continue to suffer.
Do you think these parents will ever find out the truth about their teens' illness?
Image via Lori Grieg/Flickr
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Comments 49
i wonder if it could be "Sydenham's Chorea".. as crazy as this sounds but its a form of strep.. but "Sydenham's Chorea" affects females mostly in teen years and has almost the same symptoms as those girls.. including the body tics..
The parents need to get together if the Drs are not helping and begin discussing what they have in common. Vaccines? My top thought. Second would be if the girls had something put in their drinks at school or a drug of some sort they all tried. Third would be food from the school anything that is taken internally is what I would think. This is just crazy I would fight tooth and nail to get these girls together and the parents find 1 dr to work with all 3 girls.
Someone earlier asked if it is Gardasil why not more cases. That question scares me there have been over half a million complaints against gardasil involving not only things like this but paralysis & death as well. Gardasil was approved after only 3 years of testing! Fast tracking meds is always a bad idea! Only within the past year and a half have these claims been taken seriously supposedly the CDC is looking into it however I have seen no information saying we acknowledge these cases from the company themselves.
School buildings are so often closed environments with few or even no windows that can be opened. In my upstate NY city there is a high school that has an extremely faulty heating/air conditioning system that breaks down continually. Temperatures have been known to rise over 100 degrees in some of the classrooms. Since the system will cost 2 million to replace, the district allows the school nurse to send individual students home when they are sickened by excessive cold or heat, but school is never cancelled for all students shen the system breaks down. So what is a parent to do?
Sounds like a case for Dr. House, in 60 minutes they would be on their way to recovery and the parents would have answers.
Not all children reacted badly to DPT, but, some did and were not so lucky as my sister. So, money is on the Gardasil.