By Dr Ananya Mandal, MD
HPV vaccination campaign in Mexico
Mexico plans to administer the vaccine against human papillomavirus (HPV), which can cause cervical cancer, to all girls beginning next year, the country's health ministry said Tuesday.
Starting 2012, the HPV vaccine will be part of the normal course of shots given to all girls at the age of nine, Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova announced. HPV is sexually transmitted and most of the time the body can clear it on its own. However, in some cases the infection remains and can eventually lead to cervical cancer. HPV types 16 and 18 account for 70 percent of cervical cancer cases worldwide, which number about 500,000 per year, according to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). The vaccine can provide protection against these types of HPV.
Cervical cancer kills about 4,200 women in Mexico each year. The minister said while deaths from cervical cancer had fallen 47 percent in the country over the past two decades, there was still 13.4 cases for every 100,000 women last year.
Mexican health authorities hope that by making the HPV vaccine universal, they can cut the mortality rate from this type of cancer by 50 percent for women over the age of 25.
HPV vaccination Quebec
The provincial public health authority - Sante et Services Sociaux Quebec, has started a new HPV vaccination campaign.
As of 2008, the vaccine has been offered for free to pre-adolescent and teenaged girls (currently available for boys also). However, since then, the responsiveness of the targeted population has been only reducing. The complications and the secondary reactions have raised safety concerns, as well as the lack of accessibility to gynecologic specialists that should monitor any health changes accordingly, make the vaccine itself a risk as high as the HPV itself that most parents are not willing to take. About 325 cases of cervical cancer are diagnosed annually in Quebec; cervical cancer causes about 80 deaths a year in the province.
The vaccine is also being introduced for boys, and Dr. Giosi Di Meglio with the Montreal Children's Hospital said that is good news. “They are the carriers, and I think that it makes sense if you want to block the transmission of the virus to block it in as many ways as possible,” he said. In boys and men the vaccine is said to protect against genital and anal warts and oral cancers.
Public Health officials say there is conclusive evidence connecting cancer and HPV and that denying children the vaccine would be unethical.
HPV vaccination barriers
Barriers that hinder young African-American, Hispanic and poor women from completing a series of three vaccinations to prevent HPV leave them at higher risk for cervical cancer and death.
This comes from a new study from the Yale School of Public Health that extends previous findings of the disparity in a nationally representative group. The study appears online and in the October issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
Lead study author, Linda Niccolai, Ph.D., an associate professor of epidemiology said, “The degree to which these vaccines reduce disparities in cervical cancer is going to depend on adequate uptake by women who need them most.”
The team uses data collected from the federal government’s 2008-2009 National Immunization Survey on teen girls who received at least one dose of HPV vaccine. During that period, 55 percent of the adolescents received all three doses, 21 percent received one dose and 24 percent received two. While not ideal, the authors cited an “encouraging” annual completion rate increase from the first study year to the second.