Bharati Jacob, founder-partner of Seedfund, a venture investment firm based in Bangalore, had her daughter vaccinated with the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine when she entered her teens. “My brother-in-law is a paediatrician and he recommended that I vaccinate my daughter. I am pleased I could do something to protect my daughter against cervical cancer,” Jacob says.
Duru Shah, scientific director of Gynaecworld, Mumbai, recommends the vaccine to all her patients—teenagers and women in their early 40s alike. One of her patients who is in her 40s recently took the second of three doses of the HPV vaccine that are required to confer protection against the HPV infection. “My father died from gastric cancer, and my mother was recently diagnosed with uterine cancer,” she says. “After seeing them suffer, I wanted to do what I could to protect myself from any kind of cancer.”
On 2 June, actor Michael Douglas announced in an interview in The Guardian that his throat cancer had been caused by the HPV infection, a sexually transmitted disease.Read More
Sujata Kelkar Shetty, PhD, writes on public health issues and is a research scientist trained at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, US