Vaccine for Cervical Cancer and Jade Goody

Jade Goody 

link to photo

A good friend of mine has a young daughter in high school.  I urged her to have the girl vaccinated.  She is debating the issue.  In Texas there was a firestorm about this a couple of years ago when the Governor started to mandate vaccinations for all adolescent girls.  

The people objecting said that getting the vaccine meant the girls would be ready to get involved in risky sexual behavior.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Maybe many people don't know that a woman with only one sexual partner is at risk for cervical cancer if her partner already has the virus (or gets it with other partners).  In countries like Mexico, where it is not only the norm but expected that the husband is not monogamous, women are at extremely high risk.

Protect your daughters.  That is what Jade Goody would want you to do.  If the vaccine would have been available to her when she was an adolescent she wouldn't be dying now.

Cervical Cancer Vaccine Information from the Mayo Clinic

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NHS row brews over the Jade Goody effect

Charity calls for lowering of age for first smear tests
By Jeremy Laurance, Health editor
London Independent
Tuesday, 17 February 2009

Defending the reality TV star Jade Goody's decision to "die in the public eye" of cervical cancer, the publicist Max Clifford said she had given three reasons. First, she wanted to make as much money as possible for her children. Second, it kept her busy and, third, the number of women having cervical smears had gone up by more than 20 per cent as a result of the publicity around her case and that was something she was "very happy about".

The first two of her objectives has attracted broad public sympathy but yesterday her third wish divided the medical community and set a leading sexual health charity on a collision course with the NHS cancer screening service over the age at which screening should start. Marie Stopes International used Goody's case to bring pressure on the NHS cervical screening programme in England to lower the age of the first smear test from 25 to 20, to bring it into line with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

"The high-profile case of Jade Goody shows this disease is a potential threat. Certain lifestyle choices which are increasingly common among younger women and teenage girls, such as smoking and having unprotected sex at an earlier age can increase the risk of developing cervical abnormalities. Bringing screening for English women into line with the rest of the UK can only be beneficial," said Liz Davies, Marie Stopes director for UK and Europe. A spokesman for Marie Stopes said most other countries with screening programmes, within and outside the UK, started at 20 or even earlier. "Our main point is that England sits alone in terms of the developed world. To fly in the face of what everyone else does is arrogant and odd. It suggests there is an economic reason here – cost is always an issue with the NHS."...more