Two days before the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination campaign’s culmination, the State Minister for National Health Dr Malik Mukhtar Ahmar Bharath has revealed that the campaign only managed to vaccinate 4.5 million girls as against an estimated target of 13 million girls across the country. This means that the health ministry failed to achieve even 50 per cent of the results it had hoped for.
The responsibility for this failure does not rest solely with the public, most of whom refused a vaccine for an infection they had never heard of. Nor does it solely belong to overprotective parents of daughters in a country where a woman’s dignity is deemed her lifeline. But instead, a large part of it falls on the shoulders of health officials who failed to adequately gauge their target audience and curate a campaign befitting their values and beliefs.
It is no secret that cervical cancer claims the lives of around 3,000 to 4,000 women in Pakistan every year. Approximately 20 million women are HPV-positive – an infection responsible for 95-100 per cent of cervical cancers in the country. Yet, this information is often clouded by throngs of misconceptions and myths about the infection and its vaccine.
HPV is primarily a sexually transmitted infection. But the health ministry should have taken steps through awareness campaigns and partnerships with Islamic scholars to highlight that that is not its only method of transmission. That regardless of the cause, even newborn children can contract the virus. That in a polygamous society where girls are traditionally married off at a young age, no stone should be left unturned for their protection against a fatal disease.
Blaming the vaccine’s reception on ‘propaganda’ does not automatically dispel existing myths. It is the government’s responsibility to educate the public so that awareness itself can deter them from believing unfounded myths.
