Listen to the message
Cervical Cancer Vaccine
If you haven’t heard the groundbreaking cancer news announced last month, then listen up.
The FDA approved a vaccine for cervical cancer, a disease that kills 4,000 American women, and a quarter-million women worldwide, every year.
The vaccine guards against cancer caused by the human papillomavirus, or HPV, the most common sexually transmitted disease. The vaccine should be in doctors’ offices this year.
Now the only remaining hurdle is ensuring that the $360 vaccine is made available to every woman in the US and the world.
Remember my favorite saying: “A dollar of prevention is worth a million dollars in cures”? This is another example of just that.
We must call on our public and private insurers to make this vaccine available to every young woman. If we don’t, we’ll pay for it later: in greater long-term medical costs, and in thousands of lives.
