“Cervical cancer is preventable, but it’s a disease that has taken too many of our mothers, our daughters, our sisters and our friends,” said Dr Jalikatu Mustapha, Sierra Leone’s Deputy Minister of Health 2. The lost women include Dr Mustapha’s own grandmother, who died of the cancer – the country’s most common, and second-deadliest, according to 2022 data – 19 years ago.

“Every year, we diagnose about 500 women with cervical cancer, and we lose more than 70% of them. That is a very high fatality rate, it’s very bad and unacceptable for us as a country,” she said.

Dr Mustapha spoke to VaccinesWork as the country prepared to launch what she termed “a massive campaign”: a week-long sprint, beginning on 17 November to vaccinate about a million girls against the cancer-causing human papillomavirus (HPV).

The HPV vaccine was piloted in Sierra Leone in 2013, with a Gavi-supported national roll-out beginning in 2022. “Since then, we’ve become even better at it,” said Dr Mustapha. But with President Julius Maada Bio calling for the elimination of cervical cancer – a disease that is 90% preventable by vaccination – an ambitious push was called for.

Some 1.3 million doses of the jab were on standby in the nation’s fridges, earmarked for girls aged 11 to 18. The epidemiological justification for that age range, explained Dr Mustapha, is that reaching girls before sexual activity exposes them to the virus maximises the vaccine’s efficacy. The virus is extremely common, causing cancer in a minority of cases, typically when a woman reaches her 30s, 40s, or 50s. A single dose in adolescence can all but rule out that risk.

“This vaccination we are doing now, the benefits and impacts will be seen within the next 10, 20, 30 years from now, when we get a massive reduction in our cervical cancer cases,” Dr Mustapha said.

Schools stood at the ready to host a large number of the campaign’s vaccination sessions, with Abubakar Kuyateh, Director of Programs at the Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary School Education, saying, “I want to assure the health workers that the Ministry of Basic Education is ready to collaborate for a successful implementation of the vacation campaign.”

The campaign got underway, raising wistful thoughts, for some, of a kind of safety their generation missed out on. “If this vaccine was available when I was growing up as a child it could have saved me, but currently I’m still in treatment at hospital in Freetown,” Beatrice Kindawa, a 56-year-old cancer patient told VaccinesWork. “I will encourage young girls to take the vaccine earlier, so as to protect themselves from this dangerous cervical cancer disease,” she added.

Women like Kindawa, born too soon to benefit from Sierra Leone’s vaccination programme, will benefit from regular screening. Early-stage cancers are easier to combat with surgery and treatment than advanced cases, and the Ministry of Health is working to make life-saving check-ups easier to access.

“We’ve set up cancer survival treatment centres and 24 active screening sites to help the patients get access,” said Dr Mustapha. “Seven are in the western area of the capital Freetown and the others across the country.”

This article is republished from VaccinesWork under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. VaccinesWork is an award-winning digital platform hosted by Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance covering news, features and explainers from every corner of global health and immunisation.