Finally – boys WILL be given lifesaving jab, Minister hints
HEALTH Minister Steve Brine has given the first clear sign that the Government wants to end the HPV ‘vaccine apartheid’, which The Mail on Sunday has been campaigning against.
The MP, whose brief includes public health policy, admitted that arguments claiming that it is not cost-effective to vaccinate teenage boys against the cancer-causing virus ‘do not feel right’.
As this newspaper has repeatedly reported, HPV, which is spread by sexual contact and kissing, causes not only cervical cancer in women but thousands of cancers every year in men.
However, the NHS vaccinates only girls, calculating it is cheaper to treat the tumours HPV causes than to fund the £22million a year needed to vaccinate boys. The NHS recently extended vaccinations to gay men, but in another hint that he supported a policy shift, Mr Brine said that ‘is certainly not the end of the story’.
Because the Scottish Government follows the same vaccination advice as the UK Government, any change at Westminster is likely to be reflected north of the Border.
Experts on the NHS’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), have been reconsidering their stance.
Speaking last week at the first Commons debate on the issue, Mr Brine promised the JCVI would make a final ruling this year.
He said that both the terrifying rise in head and neck cancers attributed to the virus, and the question of gender equality, would be taken into account.
Wednesday’s debate featured impassioned speeches from across the political spectrum, with Tory, Labour, Democratic Unionist and SNP MPs speaking in favour of vaccinating boys.
The debate was introduced by senior Conservative backbencher Sir Roger Gale, who said that giving the vaccine to boys was a ‘no brainer’. He described the current policy as a ‘good way… to damage health’.
Sir Roger said the cost of treating cancers caused by the human papilloma virus in men was already at least £21million, which took ‘no account of the social costs and the other damage done’.
He cited the case of an NHS surgeon unable to work for many months because he needed a replacement jaw, as well as the £100,000 cost of treatment.
SNP MP Martin Docherty-Hughes said: ‘The young men of the UK deserve better. We need to take collective responsibility and stop genderising the public health debate. Only then will we create a more equal, fairer and far healthier society.
‘We need to say to men who are suffering from HPV that we will do everything in our power as politicians to meet the challenge they have placed before us.’
Tory backbencher Sir Peter Bottomley recalled the decision to vaccinate girls in 2008 was delayed long after the link between HPV and cervical cancer became clear, and urged the Minister ‘not to make the same mistake again’.