A free and “generalized” vaccination campaign will be launched in colleges for 5th graders in order to eradicate the papillomavirus, responsible for 6,000 new cases of cancer each year in France. Women who tested positive for the papillomavirus tell BFMTV.com that they wish they could have been vaccinated.j
The papillomavirus vaccine was not an option when Isabelle Gachet was a teenager in the 1990s. “At the time, it did not exist. We did not talk about it at all”, says this 43-year-old nurse, who was diagnosed with precancerous lesions linked to a papillomavirus two years ago, during a control smear.
This Tuesday, Emmanuel Macron announced the implementation of a free and generalized vaccination campaign in colleges for 5th graders. The objective is to eradicate the papillomavirus, responsible for 6,000 new cases of cancer per year.
In France, the HPV vaccine has only been recommended for young girls since 2007, and only since January 1, 2021 for boys. Thus, the vaccination coverage rate is only 37% for girls and 9% for boys, while the ten-year cancer control strategy 2021-2030 aims for a target of 80% within seven years.
Isabelle Gachet, a 40-year-old from Dordogne who had gone to consult her gynecologist for abnormal bleeding, then had to undergo a conization of the cervix. This is a minor surgery that is supposed to remove a portion of the cervix. With hindsight, she is convinced of having been contaminated by an STI (sexually transmitted infection) by her husband twenty years earlier. At the time, we had to remove condyloma (genital warts) from him with a laser.
“It would have saved me a lot of trouble”
“It was fortunately caught in time, but the doctors warned me that the virus would never disappear. Every year now, I have a check-up and it’s a bit like the sword of Damocles. I know that the cells pre-cancerous can come out of nowhere,” says the mother of two teenage girls, who was quick to discuss the subject with her two teenage daughters.
Aged 12 and 15, the two young girls were vaccinated as soon as the vaccine was offered to them. “I’ve heard people say it’s useless. When you’re teenagers, you may have this impression, but I’m proof that it can be useful later: it still helps to avoid many worries as you get older.
“Today I can say it: I would have liked to have been offered this vaccine to me or to my mother when I was young. It would have saved me a lot of trouble, and I probably wouldn’t have developed this filth,” she adds.
“I told my daughter that she absolutely had to do it”
The question had never arisen either for Dorothée Hirard, a 39-year-old waitress in Arbanats (Gironde), before she was diagnosed with a grade 3 (high-grade) papillomavirus infection in 2011, when she was 27 years old. “I was afraid of not being able to have children after that but that was not the case. I was just given a laser to remove all the lesions,” says this mother of three children, which is now monitored every year. Her 13-year-old son has just been vaccinated, sensitized by his mother’s story.
Magali Oliveira, too, regrets not having had access to the vaccine in her youth. In 2020, this 50-year-old woman developed severe stomach aches and an abnormally swollen abdomen. A smear revealed at that time to the Toulouse cashier, mother of two children, that she was positive for the papillomavirus. Fortunately for her: there is still time for her to proceed to a hysterectomy, namely the total removal of her uterus.
A cumbersome process that will mark the beginning of a long series of health problems. “It can be very painful. For my part, I no longer want to have children so it’s still fine, but I imagine the suffering it can be for a young woman to whom this is announced”, affirms the fifty year old.
“This vaccine, I immediately told my 15-year-old daughter that she absolutely had to do it,” says the mother, who “didn’t need to talk for long” to convince her. :
“At her age, she didn’t think much about it. She’s a teenager who makes her little life and she doesn’t think about that, which is normal. I told her ‘it’s to protect you’ “.
Not just a women’s affair
And the papillomavirus is not just a women’s affair. This virus, sexually transmitted, can also affect men and cause cancer of the penis, anus or cancers of the ENT sphere (throat, mouth etc.) This is what happened to Thierry Moyer in June 2019 After a persistent sore throat, this manager of a rotisserie in Cagnes-sur-Mer (Alpes-Maritimes) discovered a lump in his throat, which turned out to be tonsil cancer caused by a papillomavirus.
“I was surprised by the diagnosis. As a 51-year-old man, I did not feel concerned”, tells BFMTV.com Thierry Moyer, for whom this virus “affected women more often”, and “the mostly in a benign way”.
Chemotherapy, radiotherapy… This father is forced to undergo three months of heavy treatment, which makes him lose 25 kilos. Three years later, he came out of it very weakened but still does not know “how he was contaminated”.
“The doctors told me it was probably related to a sexual relationship, but I’m not too much of a running back and forth so I don’t know… It’s very difficult to trace the origin contamination,” says the man, who had never heard of HPV vaccination before catching cancer.
“Several reasons explain the low French vaccination coverage”, explains to AFP Sophie Vaux, program coordinator on the monitoring of vaccination coverage at Public Health France. One of the first is the cost of the vaccine, between 95 and 116 euros. If it is reimbursed at 65% by Health Insurance and the remaining part covered by complementary mutual insurance, the advance of costs or the absence of mutual insurance can slow down.
In addition, a recent study by Public Health France showed in particular that vaccination was lower in the poorest populations. In France, unlike other countries, vaccination against HPV infections is called “opportunistic” in the sense that it is the teenager or his parents who make an appointment with the doctor for vaccination.