OPINION:'ANY DAY I can swing the legs out of the bed is a good one." Thank you sir, part-time taxi driver, full-time sage. You can't disagree these days, when any tiny fleck of positivity needs saluting with a Mexican wave of approval. But even in a depression it's easy to be chipper when your personal odds are looking reasonable.
Poor old Jade Goody, maybe she is at the stage of being grateful for each day. Or, more likely, Goody, Big Brother star and of late, cervical cancer sufferer, is railing at the injustice of the possibility of her life being snuffed out. Wherever you stand on Goody, you have to feel sorry for her and her two children.
Someone decided that, seeing as she plays out her life on screen, it was a fine idea to receive her cancer diagnosis live on air also. It’s all gone horribly wrong for Goody as she battles for her life in the harsh glare of publicity. Her raucous, car-crash existence has become a metaphor for our lives; for the tarnished bling, the notion of instant celebrity forged from the ethically defunct format of reality TV and the blitzed actuality of our current predicaments.
Yet this may be her one chance to make a difference and get into the history books for a reason other than racial bullying. Jade Goody is unwittingly dragging the spotlight on to the unglamorous, preventable disease of cervical cancer and to the hundreds of women in Britain and Ireland who die each year from it.
In Ireland cervical cancer is the second most common cancer to affect young women aged 15 to 44. Every year about 209 women of all ages are diagnosed with the disease and about 73 women die of it. The cancer is caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV) a virus which is very common and which can be transmitted by genital contact at any age.
Generally the infection clears up but for some it may develop into cervical cancer. Eight out of 10 sexually active females are exposed to the virus and exposure can happen without full sexual intercourse. It can infect men.
There is a vaccine which could, over time, eradicate this horrible disease but our Minister for Health, Mary Harney, has decided we cannot afford a nationwide programme. The HSE dropped plans to start a vaccination programme for all 12-year-olds from September 2009. Harney said it was a case of either funding for the roll-out of the cervical screening programme or vaccination of our 12-year-olds.
We can fling billions at the banks and let their directors take home jaw-dropping wedges of our cash as payment for dragging the country to the brink of bankruptcy, but we cannot afford €9 million for our 12-year-old girls or €20 million to vaccinate our 13- to 15-year-olds. Those parents who can afford it and are informed about it are getting their children vaccinated at a cost of about €400.
Dr Pat Irwin and Dr Toon Koon Chia, two doctors at the coalface of community medicine, run a general medical practice in Shankill, Co Dublin.
“You would think that the announcement of a vaccine that could prevent cancer, any form of cancer, would have people queuing round the block,” says Dr Irwin. “I have a full batch of the vaccine in my fridge here in the surgery and I haven’t had many inquiries. Frankly, I’m amazed at the slow uptake. Perhaps people don’t know about it.”
“We feel that all teenage girls should get it before they become sexually active, even up to the mid-20s. The vaccine is almost 100 per cent effective in the teenage years,” says Dr TK Chian.
“This breakthrough vaccine could eventually eliminate cervical cancer altogether and we need education in the schools to get the correct information out there, mass media advertising and public discussion,” says Dr Irwin. The girls of Loreto College, Kilkenny have taken matters into their own hands and have started a campaign for a nationwide vaccination programme. May they succeed on behalf of my daughter and all the daughters of our benighted land.