There has been a ‘significant reduction’ in diagnoses of serious abnormalities in cervical screenings for women.
A recent study in the Irish Journal of Medical Science revealed pre-cancer disease in women aged 25 was 3.7% between 2015 and 2018; this had dropped to just 1.5% from 2019 to 2022.
HSE Immunisation Lead Dr Lucy Jessop told The Hard Shoulder this is the first time Irish data has been available.
“It is the story of vaccine success,” she said.
“We knew that the vaccine was very successful in preventing cervical cancers, but this is the first time we have actual data from Ireland looking at women in this country,” she said.
“What the study looked at was for the four years before the women were eligible for the HPV vaccine programme, and then the first four years of the HPV vaccine programme, and then it looked at those women when they became 25 and they came forward for their cervical smear.
“It shows they’re much less likely to have these high-grade changes in their cervical smear that can then lead to cancer after the vaccine programme was introduced.
“So, it’s really showing, for the first time, a reduction in Irish women of these high-grade changes in their cervical smears which obviously should then protect them from cancer.”
‘Cervical cancer elimination’
Dr Jessop said she believes levels are even higher now.
“This was at time when we were doing the catch-up programme, and the uptake wasn’t quite as high as it is now,” she said.
“So, in fact you would hope now that the protection is even higher for those women who would have had the vaccine programme when they were in first year of second-level school.
“We should continue to see reduction in these changes as time goes on.”
Dr Jessop said Ireland is moving closer to eliminating cervical cancer, similar to a deadline set in Australia.
“We are now working very actively on looking at cervical cancer elimination in Ireland,” she said.
“We’re hoping to have a date for that announced in the very near future.
“We’re doing some modelling with some colleagues from Australia to do something similar, so we can have a date for Ireland as well.
“Elimination is making it very rare; we’ll never get rid if cervical cancer completely, but the idea is to make it an extremely rare disease,” she added.
Listen back here:
Main image: File photo of a HPV vaccine. Image: TNS/SIPA USA/PA Images
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