>From Yaa Oforiwah Asare-Peasah A GNA Correspondent, Geneva, Switzerland (Courtesy: CHOCHO Industries/Newmont Ghana)

Geneva, Aug. 29, GNA - Promising advances in cervical cancer prevention, have been made by experts to raise the hope of millions of women battling the disease the world over. A breakthrough of a new vaccine, is offering advances for the control of the disease to become more feasible, especially in developing countries where 80 per cent of the cases occur.

In a series of papers presented on Thursday at the ongoing Cancer Congress in Geneva, leading researchers provided new developments such as highly effective vaccines against the Human Papilloma Vaccine (HPV), thus bringing hopes, which provide an unprecedented opportunity to tackle the disease in poor countries. HPV is the cause of cervical cancer.

The International Union against Cancer (UICC) in Geneva is organising the congress on the theme: "Towards True Cancer control". The experts said in their presentations at the congress that, the breakthrough was the best news bringing along better hopes as parp smear screening in developing countries, have largely failed because it was too expensive and too complicated to implement. The studies were carried out in Latin America and the Asia-Pacific Region, two of the hardest hit areas of the world and published in the journal Vaccine.

Outlined in a monograph, the report presented the best global action on cervical cancer prevention with vaccination and screening as well as regional and national research to guide governments and donors in building plans.

The research also offers new insights into the most promising strategies for tackling the disease in low resource setting, according to the lead researchers, namely Dr Xavier Bosch, Chief of the Cancer Epidemiology Research Programme at the Catalan Institute of Oncology, Ian Frazer, an Australian cancer expert and Dr Harald Zur Hausen of the German Cancer Research Centre, who discovered the HPV as the cause of cervical cancer.

In the near future, the experts said, both vaccination and screening would be needed though many countries might have to continue to focus on screening alone until the vaccine became more affordable. They said in the Asia-Pacific Region, which accounted for more than half of the world's cervical cancer cases, vaccination would be cost effective, if the cost for vaccination was fixed between 10 and 25 dollars or less than 25 dollars for the Latin America and the Caribbean. The studies, according to Dr Bosch, would be extended to the African Region, Eastern Europe and the other parts of the world which face the same difficulties and needed attention. He said the vaccine cost about 120 dollars per dose or 360 dollars per vaccinated girl and added that "efforts are needed now to adapt the current price of the vaccine to meet what individual countries can afford.

"Many countries would need subsidies for some time", he added. Dr Bosch said the price of the vaccine and the support for massive vaccination campaigns were biggest barriers for now, in addition, to generating the political support for an intervention, cultural acceptability of the vaccine and monitoring the circulating virus. He called for advocacy to promote the vaccine, government and donor support and the rich countries to provide support for developing countries to produce the vaccines at subsidised and reduced rates. The Executive Director of the UICC, Isabel Mortara, chaired the programme and said: "This new era of cervical cancer presents many opportunities and challenges ahead. There is now realistic hopes for controlling this disease where the toll is the highest and we have to seize this opportunity". Ghana is making a poster presentation of breast cancer cases at the Okomfo Anokye Teaching Hospital and interventions in control activities at the congress, which closes on Sunday August 31.