Eight Pakistani women die daily from cervical cancer, experts warn

Medical experts call for urgent HPV vaccination campaign

KARACHI:

Every day, eight women in Pakistan lose their lives to cervical cancer — a preventable disease caused almost entirely by the Human Papillomavirus (HPV). If timely interventions are not undertaken, experts warn, the burden of this disease could triple in the next seven decades.

These alarming statistics were shared by Dr Muneeba Ahsan Syeed, Consultant and Faculty of Infectious Diseases at the Sindh Infectious Diseases Hospital and Research Centre, Dow University of Health Sciences.

She was speaking at a seminar titled 'HPV Vaccine: Separating Facts from Fiction', jointly organised by the Department of Microbiology and the Association of Molecular and Microbial Sciences, at the Pharmacy Auditorium of the University of Karachi.

Dr Syeed stated that globally, one woman dies every two minutes from cervical cancer, and 90 per cent of these deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries. Out of 660,000 cervical cancer cases reported worldwide annually, 95 per cent are linked to HPV infections, she added.

"In Pakistan alone, between 4,700 to 4,800 new cervical cancer cases were reported in 2023, resulting in nearly 3,000 deaths — a mortality rate of 64 per cent," she said, adding that while the proportion of reported cases may seem low, this is due to chronic underreporting, lack of routine screening, and the absence of a national cancer registry.

Pakistan officially launched its first nationwide HPV vaccination campaign on Sept 15, 2025. Despite being the second-largest country in South Asia in terms of unvaccinated children — with 419,000 children missing routine immunisation, as per a study in The Lancet - it is only now beginning to include the HPV vaccine in its routine immunisation programme.