“There’s been a lot of concern, particularly with the vaccine, that dissemination of information about HPV has come mainly from the drug companies, and people are, not surprisingly, a little sceptical of pharmaceutical-based education programmes,” Cuzick says.

Currently, the vaccine protects women from HPV strains that are responsible for about 75 per cent of cervical cancer cases. But doctors are well on their way to developing vaccines that will inoculate against all nine strains of the human papilloma virus, so, according to Cuzick, widespread vaccination of young women could wipe out cervical cancer within 50 years.

As someone who has been vaccinated and who has witnessed the expensive and scary health problems HPV can cause, I certainly support widespread HPV vaccination and agree with Cuzick that a vaccination campaign needs to come from health care providers and government, not just pharmaceutical companies.

Still, I don’t understand Cuzick’s argument that eradicating HPV will eradicate cervical cancer. While the majority of cervical cancer cases are caused by HPV, not all of them are. Either The Independent missed something in the retelling of Cuzick’s argument, or he’s not addressing a crucial loophole in his reasoning.

In any case, his point about the importance of widespread HPV vaccination still stands. Would you, or have you, had your daughters vaccinated?

Photo: columbia.edu

Fortunately, the abstinence argument against the vaccine
has been mostly steamrolled, particularly in the U.K. where a government-funded
program aims to save 400 lives a year by administering the Cervarix vaccine to 12- and 13-year-old girls. (In the Australia and the U.S., the more commonly used, but
very similar, vaccine is called Gardasil.)

But the program has gotten some bad–and scary–press
recently, after a 12-year-old girl became paralyzed from the waist down shortly
after receiving the vaccine at school. Ashleigh Cave’s
mother, Cheryl, believes that the shot was implicated in her daughter’s
illness, but doctors have claimed that the vaccination was
unrelated to the sudden onset of Ashleigh’s illness.

Although nothing I’ve read indicates that Ashleigh has been
definitely diagnosed yet, it seems clear that she has Guillain-Barré syndrome,
which can cause paralysis, and which has previously been linked (perhaps
wrongly) with the cervical cancer vaccine.

13 girls are reported to have been diagnosed with Guillain-Barré
after receiving the Gardasil vaccine in the U.S., causing some concern among parents about the safety of getting their daughters vaccinated. However, considering the total number of girls who received the vaccine and the natural incidence of the disease, 13 is within the number
of people who would be expected to fall prey to Guillain-Barré just by chance. Doctors and health experts continue to assert that there is no reason to
believe the cervical cancer vaccine is unsafe.

Still, it is only too easy to understand why Ashleigh’s
mother harbors her doubts, considering that her daughter’s initial diagnosis
was “vertigo and generalised myalgia, probably due to recent vaccinations.” I
hope further investigations can set the public’s collective mind