HPV
A cervical cancer vaccine is not getting to many of the girls who need it the most, a new study shows.
Mississippi and Arkansas, two of the nation’s poorest states, also have the highest death rates from cervical cancer — a result of poor access to basic screenings and health care for a large number of women, says Peter Bach of New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
Yet in Mississippi, where the vaccine could perhaps save the greatest number of lives, only 16 percent of teenage girls in 2008 received the vaccine Gardasil, according to Bach’s paper in the March 20 edition The Lancet.
About 22 percent of Arkansas girls ages 13 to 17 got the vaccine, which costs $390 for three shots.
In the wealthier state of Rhode Island, where cervical cancer mortality is half as high as in Mississippi and Arkansas, 55 percent of girls received Gardasil, the paper says. Though there’s nothing wrong with wealthier girls getting the vaccine, Bach says, the low vaccination rates in poor states are “a failure.”
The Food and Drug Administration approved Gardasil in 2006 and another vaccine, Cervarix, in 2009. Both block infection with the cancer-causing human papillomavirus, or HPV.
Merck spokeswoman Pamela Eisele told USA Today that the company has several programs to help poor women afford the shots.
Low-income girls also can get free vaccines from the federal Vaccines for Children program, says Lance Rodewald of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Partly because of that program, 46 percent of girls in households with incomes below the poverty level received at least one HPV shot in 2008, compared with 36 percent of those above poverty level.
The federal poverty level is $22,050 for a family of four, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
But women’s health activist Barbara Brenner of Breast Cancer Action told USA Today that Bach’s study highlights broad inequalities in American health care.
“There are places in this country where women have nothing,” Brenner said. “But we don’t notice them until a story like this comes out.”