With cervical cancer killing 33,000 annually in the region, experts in Mexico City consider promise, costs of detection, treatment and introduction of new vaccines against deadly virus

MEXICO CITY—(12 May 2008) Thirty-three thousand women in Latin America and the Caribbean die each year of preventable cervical cancer, caused by a virus that a new study says infects 20 percent of men and women in the region and as many as 30 percent of the youngest women. Dramatic new opportunities offered by better screening, treatment and the securing of an affordable vaccine for girls and young women can reduce the current death toll and prevent it from rising to 70,000 over the next two decades, according to new research analyzing the regional impact of the Human Papillomavirus (HPV).

The findings are being presented in Mexico City at a conference convened by the World Health Organization (WHO), Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the Albert B. Sabin Vaccine Institute, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to discuss cervical cancer control in Latin America and the Caribbean.

“This new analysis of 15 years of research on HPV in Latin America and the Caribbean provides the first comprehensive assessment of HPV in the region, suggesting the virus is far more common than expected and that in the absence of intensive intervention we will see a substantial increase in deaths from cervical cancer,” said Ciro de Quadros, Executive Vice President of the Albert B. Sabin Vaccine Institute, which commissioned the study in collaboration with PAHO, the CDC, the Harvard School of Public Health, and Barcelona’s Institut Català d’Oncología. “Ultimately, this analysis should convince national health authorities in the region that the time has come to make the fight against cervical cancer a national priority.”

The two-day meeting, which includes international global health experts, as well as regional health officials, focuses on the urgent need for new approaches to screening and treatment, in addition to preventive vaccines, to avoid what could be a substantial increase in cervical cancer deaths in the coming decades. According to experts at the meeting, if precancerous lesions caused by HPV are left undetected and untreated, an estimated 70,000 of today’s young girls in Latin America and the Caribbean will die in the prime of their adulthood by 2030, deeply affecting their families and communities.

A centerpiece of the two-day event in Mexico City, the sweeping review provides the best evidence to date of the prevalence and alarming impact of HPV in Latin America and the Caribbean. The study also explores the economics of adopting an HPV vaccine that is currently the most expensive childhood immunization in the world. It concludes that over a ten-year period the vaccine has the potential to prevent more than half a million deaths in the region, but it may have significant financial implications for the health care systems of the countries studied.

The analysis indicates that the prevalence of HPV among Latin American and Caribbean women 15-24 years old is 20 to 30 percent, and 20 percent among men in the region.