Author: Musaazi Namiti. PHOTO/COURTESY
The head of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, used the International Day of the Girl Child, which falls on October 11, to bring the world’s attention to a disease that afflicts women and is generally ignored until it strikes.
In a social media post that was illustrated by his photo and that of his daughter, Mr Ghebreyesus said: “As a proud father of a teenage daughter, Bren, I am deeply grateful for the strides science has made to protect her and millions of other girls from a really deadly disease — cervical cancer.”
He urged governments to make HPV, the vaccine against cervical cancer, accessible and affordable, saying vaccinating at least 90 percent of the girls in any country can eliminate cervical cancer. And he assured parents that the vaccine is safe.I am neither a cancer expert nor a healthcare professional. My views in this article are based on medical literature I read from time to time as a journalist with a keen interest in health matters. I have also taken care of patients suffering from non-communicable diseases.
According to the WHO, cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer in women. In 2022, the year for which the WHO has the latest figures, around 660,000 new cases were recorded. The disease killed 350,000 people, and about 94 percent of the deaths occurred in low-and middle-income countries.
Cervical cancer and other common types of cancer — think lung cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer and colon cancer — begin in our bodies.
Religious people believe our bodies are given to us by God. If this is true, it means that if God really wanted to create bodies without cancer, he would do so. Let us look at breast cancer.
According to Dr Mary Nyangasi, the cancer control lead at the Global Breast Cancer Initiative, breast cancer occurs when cells in the milk-producing tissues begin to grow at an abnormal pace and in abnormal areas.
While breast cancer can be caused by use of tobacco products and alcohol, it does affect women who neither smoke nor drink. This means you do not have to be a smoker or an alcohol consumer to be a breast cancer candidate.
You get breast cancer simply because you have breasts — just as men get prostate cancer because they have the prostate. Mr Ghebreyesus thanked science for providing the HPV vaccine against cervical cancer, and he could not have been more right. It is tempting for religious people to thank God for good health and longevity, but think about this. Rheumatoid arthritis is caused when the immune system mistakenly attacks the healthy tissues of your joints.
Religious people believe the immune system was/is created by God. But how can it be that the system that is supposed to protect you from disease instead attacks your health? Another good example: When the NRM government came to power in 1986, there was no immunisation programme in Uganda against what healthcare professionals used to call the child killer diseases: measles, polio, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis (whooping cough).
Measles, in particular, killed many children. I witnessed this in one village where one household lost five children in one week and another lost two.
Then, as now, there was God who takes credit for our health. But he did not/could not stop measles from killing many children.
It took the intervention of science, which provided vaccines, enabling mass immunisation, and the child killer diseases were brought under control.We thank God for our health, but does it really make sense?
