- Imagine addressing the tragedy
of losing a woman every two minutes.
What better story would you have?
- Ian Frazer arrived from Scotland 25 years ago.
Today he's Australian of the year.
He developed a vaccine for cervical cancer,
which kills a quarter
of a million women worldwide each year.
- And that was always my interest was understanding
why some people can't get rid of virus infections,
but this was a very significant virus
because it would, can trigger a cancer.
And therefore it seemed like a good one to focus on,
to try and study and understand why some people
get rid of viruses and other people can't.
To make a vaccine against a virus,
normally you grew up the virus and either kill it
or render it less dangerous
and then use that as the vaccine.
Papilloma virus is an annoying virus
because we can't grow it in the lab.
We had to wait until the techniques of genetic engineering
came along and then my colleague, John Sue, and I,
we found a way of building the shell of the virus.
And it was the shell of the virus
that has become the vaccine.
- [Reporter] An HPV vaccine, which could become
as widely used as the vaccine for rubella.
- This is potentially a vaccine which could be administered
to all young people around the world.
- But yes, it is a race, let's face it.
- We've delivered over 200 million doses
of the vaccine worldwide.
In Australia, this vaccine is paid for by the government
and made available to all boys and girls
between the age of 12 and 14 through schools.
Globally, the vaccine is not so widely available.
In some countries, you have to buy it
and other countries, it's simply not available at all
and in the developing world that really relies
on charitable donations to get vaccines into the country.
The challenge of course is to get universal immunization.
If we had a successful immunization program,
we could not only prevent the cancers,
but eventually eliminate the virus entirely.
There needs to be a global initiative
to get rid of papilloma virus infection
and it starts from the top,
it starts from the World Health Organization
that are very keen to achieve this.
It then needs to flow down through the aid agencies
to make sure that the vaccine is available in the countries
where cervical cancer is common, such as Sub-Saharan Africa,
and indeed many of the developing world countries.
The Cancer Council Australia
through the individual state cancer councils
has sponsored research into how to prevent cervical cancer
over many years.
- So from a Cancer Council perspective,
the identification of the vaccine in Australia
meant that we were at the forefront of being able to
lobby government to get girls vaccinated.
And we know that as school participation rises
in low income countries, vaccination opportunities
will also increase.
And that provides a great opportunity for not only
cervical cancer, but for also broader cancer
and chronic disease arenas.
- Vaccines have been the single most effective means
of preventing avoidable deaths of extending life
across the planet.
It's really sad to see that people should go out there
and not protect their children against these infections.
There is no reason why should people should be worried about
vaccines, they are safe, they're proven effective.
Australia has led the way in cervical cancer prevention,
right from the beginning.
We started by immunizing all the girls back in 2007,
in 2012, we added in a program,
so that all boys were immunized as well.
The impact of this globally is that we can now demonstrate
to the world at large how effective the vaccines
actually are because the burden of disease
caused by these papilloma viruses in Australia
has just disappeared over the course of the last 10 years.
And we are now seriously thinking that cervical cancer
will simply be gone from Australia by 2028.
- We have the vaccines, we have the diagnostics
and we have the treatment.
When we have all the weapons at hand,
failure should not be an option.
- I strongly believe that with collective effort,
we can eradicate papillomavirus infection.
It will take a while to do that,
but if we can deliver 200 million doses of vaccine
in 10 years, we can immunize the whole population
over the next 30 or 40 years
and reasonably expect that within my children's lifetime,
we'll have no more cervical cancer.