By Gatonye Gathura
NAIROBI, KENYA: On May 14, nine-year-old Mariam became the first girl in Kenya to receive a free vaccine against cervical cancer at her Central Primary School in Kitui County.
Miriam is among an estimated 21,000 Class Four girls in Kitui County who will get the three-dose vaccine before the year ends.
The second dose will be administered before the end of this second term, in July, while the final dose for this group will be given in November, which will mean Mariam and her colleagues will be fully immunised against cervical cancer.
But unfortunately other Standard Four girls outside Kitui County will not get the vaccine until about the Class Four of 2015. Those are the pupils in Class Two today.
Huge costs
“The current phase involves vaccinating some 21,000 Class Four girls in Kitui County after which the project will be evaluated and adjustments made before being rolled out countrywide, sometime either next year or in 2015,” Dr Agness Nakato, who is coordinating the project for the Ministry of Health told The Standard on Sunday yesterday.
At a negotiated cost of about Sh373 per dose ($4.50) it will cost about Sh7.8 million annually to have all the Standard Four girls in the county, both in public and private schools, covered. Assuming about 377,000 girls enrolled for primary education each year then it would require about Sh141 million to buy the vaccines for the entire class four pupils.
But this is not even half the story, because according to Dr Nakato, logistics, shipment, actual distribution and other peripherals amount to a huge cost. At this point, she said, it is not possible to tabulate the actual cost of the whole exercise.
Although donors heavily fund the project through the Global Access to Vaccines Initiative (GAVI), Kenya Government is meeting a big part of the cost. Nakato says for the Kitui project they initially had budgeted for 8,500 girls only, but when they carried out an on the ground audit they found the actual number of girls qualifying for the vaccine to be about 21,000. “The Government will meet the cost for the 13,000 additional girls.”
According to Nakato, the vaccine has been found to be safe in experimental and real life conditions and to offer protection against a cancer that is a major killer for women in the country. “The vaccine will henceforth, be given free of charge to all girls in Standard Four of every year in three doses. This will protect them from future development of cervical cancer.
The vaccine, like all the others used in public facilities, is safe and already in use in several other countries,” says Dr Shahnaz Shariff, the Director of Public Health, who presided over the launching of the project in Kitui.
The Kenyan Ministry of Health says Kitui County was selected for the project because of its good performance in routine immunisation and outreach campaigns. According to Dr Gathari Ndirangu, who is consulting for the Government on the vaccine project, the initiative has received high acceptance among the parents in Kitui. “The Ministries of Education and that of Health have been involved in intense discussions with the parents in the county and they are very receptive and supportive of the project,” Dr Ndirangu told The Standard On Sunday yesterday.
The vaccine, however, which comes in two brands Gardasil from Merk & Co and Cervarix from GlaxoSmithKline, is available in the private sector at about Sh8,000 for the required three doses.
The vaccine protects women against some strains of the Human Papiloma Virus (HPV) transmitted during sexual activity. There are about 40 types of HPV that can infect the genital areas of men and women. Most HPV types cause no symptoms and go away on their own. But some types can cause cervical cancer in women.
Sexually active
This vaccine is recommended for girls and women aged nine through to 26 years though it is thought best for females before they have become sexually active and hence possibly exposed to HPV.
Females who are sexually active may also benefit from the vaccination, but they may get fewer benefits. A year after the death of Wambui, Mbugua was chased away from his matrimonial home and rented a one-room house in Kitengela.