Your money or your life

The vaccine for the human papillomavirus was approved for use in New Zealand today on the grounds that it is both effective and safe. Most people probably know by now that HPV is a STD and it causes cervical cancer. Obviously this vaccine is a huge step forward for women's health (and men's too HPV also causes penile cancer).

But there are a couple of big questions around it, the first is cost. The vaccine will be available from September, but it'll cost $400. It can be publicly funded if it is on the National Immunisation Schedule.* But getting a vaccine on the scheduleis a process that takes at least a year. They don't expect that will happen before 2008. I don't know how many women will become infected with HPV between now and then, but it'll be too many. I believe that this vaccination should be offered to women, free of charge, as soon as it is available in New Zealand.

I'm also really unclear about how and whether they'll offer the vaccine to women who are already sexually active (obviously I have a vested interest in this). Ideally they'll offer the test for HPV to all women, and the vaccination to those who don't already have the disease. But I suspect they're too cheap to do that. If they can't do that they should offer the vaccine, for free, for every woman who wants it. Even if there's a 90% chance that I already have the virus it seems worthwhile to get the vaccine.

So far we haven't had any moralistic jumping up and down about how this will encourage children to have sex (thank God). But I do think that it's important that there's a way that girls whose parents refuse them permission for the vaccine can get vaccinated, ideally at the same time at everyone else, but failing that the vaccine cannot just be funded at one age. Because then women whose parents are reactionary fucks will have to fork out $400 for protection that everyone else gets to take for granted.

Edited to add: Hexyhex has let me know that you can't really test for HPV, my position is that the government should then make the vaccine available to anyone who wants it.

*I was looking at the National Immunisation handbook, and it's quite interesting. It convinced me to vaccinate any hypothetical children with all the vaccines included, but it also said a lot about medical research. Like this: "A primary course of Hib-OMP at two and four months of age and a booster dose at 12 months had an efficacy of 100 percent in 2588 Navajo children less than 15 months of age, who had received either one or two doses." - we wouldn't want to use white children as guinea pigs.