Cherisse Moe

The Min­istry of Health is mov­ing to in­tro­duce the Hu­man Pa­pil­lo­mavirus (HPV) vac­cine in the pub­lic health sec­tor and pri­ma­ry health­care fa­cil­i­ties. HPV is a sex­u­al­ly trans­mit­ted virus passed on through gen­i­tal and skin-to-skin con­tact. At least 50 per cent of peo­ple who have had sex will have HPV at some time in their lives.

Sev­en­ty per cent of cer­vi­cal can­cers are caused by the HPV virus. Cer­vi­cal can­cer, mean­while, is the sec­ond lead­ing cause of death among women. Dr Ku­mar Sun­dara­nee­di, med­ical di­rec­tor for health pro­grammes and tech­ni­cal sup­port ser­vices in the min­istry, made the rev­e­la­tion yes­ter­day.

He spoke af­ter a sem­i­nar on Gen­der and Unit­ed Na­tions Mil­len­ni­um De­vel­op­ment Goals, at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies' St Au­gus­tine cam­pus. He said the vac­cine, al­ready used by pri­vate prac­ti­tion­ers in the pri­vate health care sec­tor, is ex­pen­sive and so the min­istry is work­ing on mak­ing it more ac­ces­si­ble.

Health Min­is­ter Dr Fuad Khan, he said, will make an of­fi­cial an­nounce­ment on the is­sue with­in one to two weeks. "It's a very im­por­tant vac­cine," he said, "but the cost to get the vac­cine at the pri­vate in­sti­tu­tions is very high, so you find that it's not af­ford­able to all,"

Sun­dara­nee­di said the min­istry is al­so work­ing to re-in­tro­duce the prac­tice of mid­wifery to give women the op­tion of giv­ing birth at home. "Of course, these de­liv­er­ies would have to be han­dled by trained health­care pro­fes­sion­als and mid­wives, so the min­istry is look­ing at that too."

Sun­dara­nee­di added that im­prov­ing the health sec­tor re­mains a pri­or­i­ty for the Gov­ern­ment, which has al­ready launched sev­er­al ini­tia­tives to pro­vide cit­i­zens with bet­ter care. "Very soon all preg­nant women will be test­ed for di­a­betes at health cen­tres, and we are al­so do­ing pret­ty well in test­ing preg­nant women for HIV/Aids. Moth­er-to-child trans­mis­sion of HIV has al­so been re­duced.

Most de­liv­er­ies are han­dled by qual­i­fied doc­tors and nurs­es," he said. Sun­dara­nee­di said the min­istry is col­lab­o­rat­ing with the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion to sen­si­tise pri­ma­ry school­child­ren on is­sues re­lat­ing to sex­u­al and re­pro­duc­tive health. Dr Yi­tades Ge­bre, ad­vis­er on fam­i­ly health and dis­ease man­age­ment, Pan Amer­i­can Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (PA­HO)/World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (WHO), said while three per cent of the coun­try's gross do­mes­tic prod­uct (GDP) is pumped in­to the health sec­tor an­nu­al­ly,

"We need more," Said Ge­bre. Ge­bre, who de­liv­ered the fea­ture ad­dress, said if the re­gion is to at­tain the Mil­len­ni­um De­vel­op­ment Goal of a 5.5 per cent re­duc­tion in ma­ter­nal mor­bid­i­ty by 2015, there was an ur­gent need for in­creased ac­cess to mod­ern con­tra­cep­tion, in­clud­ing emer­gency con­tra­cep­tion, af­ford­able and high-qual­i­ty ma­ter­ni­ty ser­vices, and in­creased avail­abil­i­ty of skilled hu­man re­sources.