Between 5 and 6 women die every day from some type of cancer related to the human papillomavirus (HPV) in Peru, where the coverage of vaccination against this virus “It has decreased worryingly” as a result of the covid-19 health emergency, the Ministry of Health warned this Sunday.
As stated in a statement by the director of Cancer Prevention and Control of the Health portfolio, Víctor Palacios, andhe Andean country registered around 4,200 new cases of cervical cancer in 2020, when 2,200 women died from this disease, caused mainly by HPV.
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“Cervical cancer is one of the cancers with the highest incidence and mortality among Peruvian women,” Palacios said, after mentioning that “the lack of a preventive culture, fear or disinterest” mean that 85% of cases are detected in an advanced stage, despite being a “completely preventable” disease through annual medical examinations and vaccination.
However, the Health portfolio warned that during the covid-19 pandemic “thousands of girls and adolescents between the ages of 9 and 13 stopped receiving the HPV vaccine“, a process that consists of the application of two doses with an interval of six months between them.
The ministry detailed that, so far in 2022, the country has only applied 10.4% of the first dose of this vaccine, while before the pandemic coverage reached 80% of the target population.
“Because of the current health emergency, coverage has dropped worryingly,” he said.
In order to reverse the current gaps, the Government established a strategy of co-administration of vaccines within the framework of the immunization campaign against covid-19, so that 11-year-old girls who go to anti-covid vaccination centers can also receive doses against human papillomavirus.
In this sense, the ministry insisted that both vaccines can be administered simultaneously because they use different technologies, because while the HPV vaccine is tetravalent and recombinant, the covid-19 vaccine uses messenger RNA.
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