Late-stage cervical cancer cases are on the rise | Hacker News Reader

Late-stage cervical cancer cases are on the rise

npr.org

6 pointsdredmorbius5 comments

Health conditions such as cervical cancer are a strong proxy for the quality of and access to women's health services.

Cervical cancer can be prevented virtually entirely through HPV vaccines, which can be administered as early as 9 years of age. The cancer (or its precancerious lesions) can be detected with Pap smears. Early-stage disease can be treated with minimal surgery, with full preservation of reproductive health and capability (e.g., preserving ability to bear children).

Access to all such services is often through public health care, e.g., Medicare, or through health NGOs such as Planned Parenthood.

Both have been under violent assault, in both figurative and literal senses, throughout the southern U.S. Which makes this study, based on 2018 data, all the more concerning.

In Australia, the HPV vaccine is compulsory (or so my understanding is from a friend who is a step parent there); they are on track to eliminate cervical cancer by 2035. In the US, there is a cohort of parents who are unable to come to terms with the fact that their children might partake in sexual acts as they mature/come of age don’t support or encourage getting the vaccine out of promiscuity beliefs. It’s deeply frustrating there is such a low cost and effective preventative for so many types of cancers (cervical, throat, neck) and we are our own worst enemy in deploying it. The rest of your points stand boldly and clearly.

https://www.health.gov.au/ministers/the-hon-greg-hunt-mp/med...

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009174352...

https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/hpv/statistics/cases.htm

This is about the lockdowns making healthcare much worse.

The hpv vaccine rates in America are rising and don’t explain the sudden increase in late stage diagnoses.

If your suggestion is correct, then there'd have to be some interesting temporal causality for lockdowns in 2020--2022 to have influenced data collection ending in 2018.

Do you have any data on HPV vaccination rates by state or region within the US?

Offtopic, it confuses me how "cervical" refers both to something related to a neck vertebrae and to something related to the female reproductive system.

How did we end up with this homonym?

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