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Vaccination, awareness for a cervical cancer-free future
While the government deserves kudos for rolling out its HPV vaccination drive, greater focus on cervical cancer awareness is also vital to eliminating the preventable disease.
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A woman consults her oncologist for early detection of cervical cancer at the Indonesian Cancer Foundation (YKI) in South Jakarta, in this file photo from 2020. (The Jakarta Post/Dhoni Setiawan)
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iming to eliminate cervical cancer by 2030, the government will start providing girls in elementary school with two doses of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine for free this year. The rollout marks significant progress in the country’s commitment to fighting the fatal disease, the second most frequent cancer among Indonesian women.
Girls will receive their first jab in the fifth grade and their second jab a year later, both during School Student Immunization Month (BIAS), which usually falls in August and November.
The HPV vaccination program builds on nationwide pilots in successive years from 2016 to 2022, starting with Jakarta in 2016 followed by Yogyakarta (2017), Surabaya (2018), Manado in North Sulawesi and Makassar in South Sulawesi (2019), and then Karanganyar and Sukoharjo in Central Java (2020), Kediri and Lamongan in East Java (2021) and finally in Bali, East Java and Central Java (2022).
Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin said on May 24 that the government hoped to reduce cervical cancer incidences and deaths through the program. The primary group targeted in the vaccination program was adolescent girls aged 11-12, because the HPV vaccine is more effective when given at younger ages.
According to 2021 data from online database the Global Cancer Observatory (Globocan), 36,633 Indonesian women developed the disease, with 21,003 dying from it.
Vaccination is part of the government’s two-pronged strategy to beat cervical cancer. No less crucial is regular screening, which includes Pap smears and visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA) tests.
Budi said the Health Ministry was preparing a program to demonstrate DNA-based testing for HPV to detect patients with precancerous lesions. The tests, now on trial in Jakarta, were deemed more effective in detecting and preventing cervical cancer.
