- Cervical cancer has impacted
almost every aspect of my life,
my job, my marriage, my mental health at stages.
Because I had an aggressive form of cervical cancer,
the best option was to cut my uterus in half.
And it was quite scary as a 26 year old to have your,
what felt like your womanhood cut out.
And to be told that when I came round,
I might be infertile.
So it was just surreal to be able to have a baby,
despite the odds.
My story was lucky,
but it could have been very different for me.
And I really want to get the message out there
that this is something that we can prevent.
- Cervical cancer is such an interesting story,
because while there are 250,000 women
who die from this cancer every year,
it is indeed both preventable
and able to be diagnosed early.
- Cervical cancer is caused by
the human papillomavirus or HPV,
and there are lots of different types of HPV.
The key discovery
was that some of those types of HPV can cause cancer
at a variety of sites in both men and women.
And then that's led directly
to the development of a vaccine,
and directly to HPV
is a better screening test for cervical cancer.
Countries like Australia are really looking imminently now
at the potential for elimination of cervical cancer.
But the real challenge is to deliver these innovations
where they're needed the most,
to help protect against the 600,000 cases
happening every year,
predominantly in low and middle income countries.
- Just imagine that a patient who is just 25 years old,
got married recently,
has not given birth at all,
then all of a sudden presents with bleeding
and you know the patient is going to die.
You are trained to save lives,
but here's the case,
most of your patients are dying within six months.
We're losing a woman every two minutes
and this should not happen,
Especially when we have all the weapons we need to fight it.
We need resources,
in addition to of course the support that we can get
from the international community.
- If we can deliver
200 million doses of vaccine in 10 years,
we can immunise the whole population
over the next 30 or 40 years.
And reasonably expect that within my children's lifetime,
we will have no more cervical cancer.
- We're delivering vaccines to young pre-adolescents,
the peak age of risk
is in the forties and fifties and beyond,
so it will take time to have an effect.
In the meantime cervical screening
has an incredibly important role to protect,
in fact the hundreds of millions of women
who are already exposed to HPV
and who are already at risk globally.
So the key message is that HPV vaccination
and cervical screening initiatives have to work together
and be scaled up together
in low and middle income countries.
- Cervical cancer can be cured if diagnosed early
and treated adequately.
Currently survival rates differ from
about 80% in high income settings,
to less than 20% in low income settings.
This disparity can be attributed to the fact
that lifesaving treatment is simply not available
in some of the countries.
But this can be changed
with investments in healthcare system
to diagnose and treat cancers.
Access to palliative care is essential
and is also part of ethical responsibility,
especially in cases when cervical cancer is not curable.
- Failure should not be an option.