Every girl who’s had the HPV vaccine knows that there is no school day more dramatic than when the nurses came in. You’d be huddled into the school hall where girls would ‘faint’ in groups, some would insist it had made them vomit, and there was always that one who full-on screamed when they put the needle near her arm. (Me. It was me.)
Brightening those memories, however, is the news that because of the vaccines, we may only need three cervical screenings in our lifetimes. Previously, women aged 25-49 had ‘smear tests’ every three years, while those aged 50 to 64 had them every five years.
Cancer Research UK funded the findings from Queen Mary University of London, where they declared that three screenings had the ‘same benefit’ for vaccinated women as the average 12 for the unvaccinated.
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Julie Sharp, Head of Cancer Research’s Health Information, said: ‘This is great news for women. The cervical screening programme is already very successful, and has led to a dramatic fall in deaths from the disease since its introduction.’
The first HPV jabs were introduced in 2008 for Year 8 students, with the first girls to have it now approaching the age of their first cervical screening. The new system will see women first being tested for the HPV virus and then, if it’s found, abnormal cells, rather than the other way around. With the jabs having a 70% prevention rate of HPV, it’s now more efficient to switch to this testing method.
HPV infects eight out of 10 unvaccinated people. Although most infections go away on their own, they can go on to cause cervical cancer, which scientists believe would be extremely rare without the existence of HPV. A new vaccination with a 90% prevention rate is set to be introduced in 2019, lowering rates even further.
The new screening routines will be implemented in England by December 2019 with Scotland and Wales hoping to introduce similar tests.
In the meantime, Cancer Research UK have stressed that women keep up with their scheduled appointments. For those of us who were the ‘guinea pigs’ in 2008, however, we have until we’re 30 years old before our first screenings. Injection days at school now suddenly seem much more worth it.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.