Minister Pandor's speech at the opening ceremony of the International Papillomavirus Conference (2017), ICC, Cape Town
It gives me great pleasure to welcome you all to Cape Town.
The Human papillomavirus is, as you know, is the single most important cause of a number of fatal cancers, but particularly of cervical cancer.
There is no anti HPV medication to remove it.
However, we are on the cusp of an enormously exciting time.
We now have at least two commercially available and highly efficacious vaccines.
In 2014 our minister of Health, Aaron Motsoaledi, championed a campaign to vaccinate girls in grade 4.
The 2014 HPV vaccination campaign is part of the Integrated School Health Programme driven by the Departments of Health and Basic Education.
Over 3,000 health professionals have been trained in all provinces and all sub-districts to implement the programme. In the 2014-2016 period over 1 million girls have been immunised.
South Africa follows other countries launching national programmes. Australia was the first in 2007. It's impact was immediate and other countries followed - Argentina for example. The US does not have a national campaign, but the vaccine is widely advertised. Some African countries have begun to provide the vaccine - Kenya and Rwanda - with the assistance of pharmaceutical sponsors or international aid organisations.
However, South Africa is the first African country to fund national vaccination on its own with government money.
Minister Motsoaledi is a great activist. He has had first hand experience of the pain and suffering caused by the HPV virus from his time in general practice.
In South Africa it is estimated that over 6,000 women acquire cancer of the cervix per year, and over 50% die of the disease. And of those dying, over 80% are black African women – illustrating how our years of freedom have not been able to break the back of this stark health inequality and access to care.
Cervical cancer is most commonly diagnosed in women between the ages of 45 and 55 years. They are at the prime of their lives, economically active, and heads of households or sole breadwinners.
They are often the moral and social force in society and their loss to a preventable disease is a tragic event.
Where countries have been able to create effective Pap smear based screening programmes, cervical cancer has become a rare disease. The incidence of and mortality from cervical cancer is a sad reflection of the Human Development Index and socio-economic status of a country or region.
In the past 20 or so years, significant research has been conducted into the prevention of cervical cancer in low-resource settings. In South Africa the impact of simple tests, such as Visual Inspection of Acetic Acid (VIA), has been particularly effective.
Another approach is testing for cancer associated chronic HPV infection of the cervix – the latter has been shown to be a highly effective approach at reducing cervical cancer and its precursors.
Recently a point of care test for cancer-associated HPV types has been created that can give a result within one hour of testing.
So there is hope, but only as long as cervical cancer prevention is recognised as an important public health problem and our governments invest in the health-care infrastructure required to initiate and sustain policies and programmes that can be supported by our often fragile and threatened health-care systems.
HIV has had a devastating impact on cervical cancer, not only because the HI virus increases risks and incidence of HPV, but also because it has diverted health-care resources away from preventative health activities such as prevention of HPV-related diseases.
In closing, let me end with this point. African governments promote health sciences because we need to improve the quality of life here in Africa.
African countries should be at the forefront of global scientific discovery, as highlighted by the pioneering work undertaken in South Africa in areas such as microbicides to prevent HIV-Aids, as well as drug and vaccine development for malaria and tuberculosis. This is shown by the full participation, including as funding parties and equal partners, by South Africa and other African countries, in the European Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership.
Much of the public health improvement over the last two centuries has been vaccine related - across the world, in both rich and poor countries, developed and undeveloped, north and south. Reaching children has been the aim of most campaigns to spread the impact of vaccines in poor countries. The barriers to vaccinating children are well known - the high prices of new vaccines, weak public health systems. But there is another barrier - low profit margins for vaccines and high profit margins for drugs. This leads to less research into vaccines and more research into drugs.
We need to boost our own manufacture of drugs and vaccines.
We need to reduce the cost of drugs and vaccines by manufacturing here in Africa rather than importing from other countries.
African investment in research and innovation is growing.
It gives me enormous pleasure to welcome you all to this important conference, with representation from diverse scientists, public health specialists, clinicians and specialists in cancer care.
Congratulations to the organisers and may the next few days enrich your collaborations and bring us ever closer to eradicating this disease.
