Health agency approves giving vaccine against cervical cancer virus

Nov 24, 2008, 14:31 GMT

Stockholm - A Swedish health agency Monday approved a general vaccination programme for young girls against the human papilloma virus, which causes cervical cancer.

As of 2010, all girls born 1999 and later are to be offered a vaccine against the HPV virus, the National Board of Health and Welfare said.

'It is good that girls get the protection that the vaccine offers, but it is important to continue to go to screening tests,' Anders Tegnell, head of the agency's unit for communicable diseases, said.

The vaccinations were to be voluntary and offered within the school health system. During 2009, local and regional authorities and the state were to discuss how to finance the programme.

Statistics suggest that some 150 women in Sweden are diagnosed with cervical cancer each year. The disease claims some 30 lives a year.

German scientist Harald zur Hausen was named one of this year's Nobel Medicine Prize laureates in October for his discovery of the human papilloma virus.

Zur Hausen is due to accept the award at a December 10 ceremony in Stockholm, along with co-winners Francoise Barre-Sinoussi and Luc Montagnier of France, who were recognized for their discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS.

Cervical cancer is the second most common cancer among women. About 5 per cent of all cancers worldwide are attributed to human papilloma virus, resulting in some 500,000 cervical cancer cases reported worldwide each year.

Of the 100 human papilloma viruses, zur Hausen was able in 1983 and 1984 to identify two types, HPV16 and HPV18, which cause 70 per cent of all cancers of the cervix, the opening to the uterus.

The medicine prize is one of the Nobel prizes endowed by Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite.