Cervical cancer vaccine gives hope to African women

Of those who develop the disease, 78 per cent of all cases in Africa result in death — much higher than in the West where screening programmes have encouraged early detection of the illness, which can take 20 years to develop.

“For each of the mothers that dies, she leaves behind three to five children when she dies, adding to the orphan situation,” Professor Isaac Adewole, chairman of the sub-Saharan Africa Cervical Cancer Working Group, told Reuters.

“By the time they die they will have spent most of their money so there will be no way to take care of these orphans,” he said at the biennial African Organisation for Research and Training in Cancer conference held in Tanzania this week.

Treatment is also expensive and Kondogoza is among the many who cannot afford a $140 regime of six doses of chemotherapy advised by doctors. She is relying on radiotherapy alone instead, which is provided free by the state.

Adewole said the prevalence of “quack doctors”, locals relying on witchcraft, also meant many women were not diagnosed.

“We doctors used to blame women but it turns out they would be visiting health professionals two or three times with no help, so doctors have to share in the blame for these deaths.”

Screening has helped to detect cervical cancer at an earlier stage in developed countries, but no African country except South Africa has a national screening programme.

Rival pharmaceutical companies Merck and GlaxoSmithKline have both developed their own vaccines —Gardasil and Cervarix — but no African country has developed a programme to give the vaccine to young girls.

“Cervical cancer kills relatively young women so more life years are lost than with other cancers, but this is a preventable cancer,” Professor Lutz Gissman, Head of Division at the German Cancer Research Centre and one of the team who discovered the virus, told Reuters at the conference.

“If you can persuade girls to get a vaccine shot, the problem will be drastically reduced in the next 10, 20 years.”

The Cervarix vaccine is licensed in more than 100 countries, including 11 in Africa. GSK is undertaking a study of 666 women in Senegal and Tanzania — where the vaccine is already licensed — to monitor the effect on the immune system and its safety.

Adewole is in favour of administering girls aged nine or 10 in their last year of primary school with the vaccine, which should be administered before the onset of sexual activity.
“Not all children go to secondary school so we need to reach them earlier,” he said.