$10m found for cervical cancer jabs

The government is planning to pay for free mass vaccinations to protect young girls against cervical cancer a programme that will cost up to $10 million a year to run.

The Sunday Star-Times understands the roll-out cost for the three-dose vaccine will be somewhere between $13.5m and $15m or $450 per patient.

It is expected to be offered to all girls from the age of 11 and introduced this year details are expected to be announced in the Budget.

Funding the new cervical cancer vaccine has been a contentious issue since the government refused to fund Gardasil, a vaccine fast-tracked by Medsafe in 2006 because it was so effective. At the time, some doctors described the decision as a "tragedy".

But in November, Prime Minister Helen Clark asked the Ministry of Health to investigate fast-tracking the introduction of the vaccine and said she was seeking urgent advice.

Gardasil, manufactured by Merck & Co, is New Zealand's only licensed HPV vaccine but the ministry is understood to be in the final stages of licensing a competing vaccine, Cervarix, a GlaxoSmithKline drug.

Cervarix is licensed in Australia for girls and women between the ages of 10 and 45. In New Zealand Gardasil is approved for the nine to 26 age group.

Health Minister David Cunliffe yesterday refused to discuss the issue. Through a press secretary he said he could neither confirm nor deny that a decision had been made to fund a cervical cancer vaccine and said an announcement of this sort was "typically made in the Budget".

The ministry is understood to have asked the pharmaceutical companies within the last month for costings and proposals for supplying the vaccines.

Dr Nikki Turner, director of the Immunisation Advisory Centre at Auckland University, said she understood the government's main task now was refining the logistics of introducing the vaccines.

The timing would be the ministry's decision.

Turner said women would still need regular smear tests as some types of HPV were not covered by either vaccine.

The programme is likely to be contentious, with some questions still unanswered about the vaccine and the government's refusal to fund extended use of life-saving drugs such as Herceptin for breast cancer.

Dr Hazel Lewis, clinical leader of the National Screening Programme, said in her organisation's newsletter in July 2007 that important issues about Gardasil had yet to be resolved.

These included the best age for vaccinating girls, whether boys should also be vaccinated against being carriers, whether boosters were needed, the percentage of the population that would accept the vaccine, whether it would make some women blase about continuing with a regular screening programme, and whether vaccination "would lead to widening of inequalities and cervical cancer incidence/mortality between ethnic and socio-economic groups".

- © Fairfax NZ News