Ms Paula Byrne:

We have talked a lot about the risk-benefit ratio and obviously, this is the key point in all the decisions that parents must make. My main point is that parents are not being given correct information and therefore the benefits are being exaggerated. If one is clear that this vaccine will prevent one's child from cervical cancer, one will take risks that one might not take if one understood that the benefits were not quite so clear-cut.

I am studying health economics at present and as part of my studies, we looked into various cost-effective analyses that were conducted around the world. The results one gets at the end of a cost-effective analysis depend on the inputs, and they vary hugely. For example, one of the main points that varies in those analyses was the effectiveness of the vaccine. In Ireland, the vaccine's cost effectiveness was assumed to be 95%. However, "assumed" is the key word, as it is stated quite clearly in documentation from the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics, NCPE, that assumptions were made that the vaccines were 90% or 95% effective - I forget which. However, the Belgians took the efficacy to be down at approximately 40%, which changed the results entirely.

I wish to make one quick comment, taken from an article in the journal Preventative Medicine. The article, entitled "Economic evaluations of massive HPV vaccination: within-study and between study variations in incremental cost per QALY gained", states: "The launching of the HPV vaccine in 2006 carried a sequence of decisions concerning its use, in the context of both pressure from the population - induced by the pharmaceutical industry - and uncertainty on long term vaccine efficacy and cost effectiveness".