Director's Speaking Notes
Distinguished guests,
Ambassadors,
Partners,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
A very good morning to you all.
I wish to extend a very warm welcome to each of you as we gather here today in PAHO to celebrate the 2007 International Women's Day, a date when women around the world, celebrate their achievements and take stock of progress made towards achieving gender equity.
Against this background, I would like to extend a heartfelt and special welcome to all of the women in this room and as well as to those within the sound of my voice at the country level, as we celebrate our lives and roles as daughters, sisters, wives, mothers and grandmothers and our contributions, heralded or unheralded, to our families, to our countries and even to the wider international community. I would also like to sincerely thank all of the men, who have gathered here with us today, for their presence and their contributions.
International Women's Day had its origins in the early 1900s, around 1908, and today in this new millennium we continue to celebrate the collective power of women past, present and future. We have seen tremendous improvement in the status of girls' education, women's health, and economic and political empowerment of women in the last few decades. Active consideration of gender as a determinant of health has led to a better understanding of many areas of health and wellbeing including policy approaches to planning and provision of health services. However, we still have challenges to overcome before gender equity becomes a reality for most women.
The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), as an international technical cooperation agency in health, has chosen to focus this year on the contribution that new technologies can make to improve women's health. We have chosen to illustrate this through specific reference to cervical cancer and the new preventive technologies that are now available. Hence, our theme for today is Make Every Girl Count: Improving Cervical Cancer Prevention.
As we reflect on our journey from girlhood to motherhood and beyond, we must acknowledge that good health is a key asset that has enabled us to achieve what we have. Today, I would like to publicly record some of the contributions of PAHO towards the improvement of women's health in this Region. PAHO is the oldest public health institution in the Americas and it is with tremendous pride but utmost humility that I stand here as its Director, a testament to the significant changes and attitudinal shifts that have occurred in society's perspectives about women's equality and emancipation.
We at PAHO have had a long history of working together with our Member States, in the spirit of Pan Americanism, to improve the health status of the girls and women of this Region. For example, PAHO has an excellent track record in immunization of both, boys and girls.
In recognition of the devastating immediate and long-term effects that giving birth to a child with a neural defect can have, PAHO is working with other partners to increase the level of folic acid added to wheat flour. This technical cooperation strategy in micronutrient fortification will help to improve women's nutrition and to reduce, by 40%, the incidence of neural tube defects among newborns throughout the Region.
We implement programs that offer systematic pre-natal care resulting in significantly reduced maternal mortality, a target of the Millennium Development Goals [MDGs]; through improved access to contraceptives and contraceptive advice; through expanding the umbrella of protection against vaccine-preventable diseases, so that diseases such as tetanus and rubella are eliminated in mothers with consequent protection of their offspring against neonatal tetanus and congenital rubella syndrome; through enhanced advocacy and program development for cervical cancer prevention, as for example, through the TATI [Tamizaje y tratamiento inmediato or screening and immediate treatment] project in Peru where more than 36,000 women were screened for cervical cancer.
In regard to the regional response to the HIV pandemic, all the efforts we are undertaking to rekindle the prevention agenda, take into consideration the bigger biological and cultural vulnerability of women to acquire the infection. This vulnerability is even higher among adolescent girls and young adult women. With the collaboration of deeply committed international partners (the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation [ASDI], the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation [NORAD], and the Spanish Agency for International Development [AECI]) we are supporting the implementation of projects intended to prevent an excessive burden of disease among young women through actions of empowerment, access to prevention technologies and promotion of sexual health.
We have also spearheaded efforts to focus on the special needs of indigenous women and other marginalized groups. For example, we provided cervical cancer screening and treatment for Maroon and indigenous women residing in Palameu in Suriname's interior.
In all of our interventions and initiatives, we fully recognize and appreciate the pivotal role of partnerships in enabling us to extend our technical reach and augment our financial resources. We certainly laud the sterling contributions of the Bill and Melinda Gates funded Alliance for Cervical Cancer Prevention, whose members included tne Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH), the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), Engender Health, JHPIEGO and PAHO, in supporting intensive information dissemination, advocacy, research and improved service delivery for enhanced cervical cancer prevention; the GAVI Alliance for supporting national vaccination programs in countries with a per capita GDP of less than US$1,000; and more recently, the human papilloma virus (HPV) Vaccine Partnership for their advocacy efforts in leading the dialogue regarding accelerated HPV vaccine introduction.
While we celebrate our collective successes in improving the health status of women in the Region, we recognize that some significant items still remain on our unfinished public health agenda. Cervical cancer is one of these, as this disease continues to be a significant public health problem in Latin America and the Caribbean. Every year over 72,000 new cases of cervical cancer are diagnosed among women residing in Latin America and the Caribbean and over 33,000 of our sisters, daughters, wives, mothers and grandmothers die from this imminently preventable disease. Families, governments, and societies pay a high monetary price, directly and indirectly, because of this cancer.
Cervical cancer screening with the Papanicolaou smear has been available and has been in use in all of our countries, though with very mixed results, for a number of reasons. Not all women have equal access to pap smear test. It depends on their ability to access health units where this service is offered and their ability to pay for it. We have also noted that in many countries younger women at lower risk for cervical cancer are disproportionately and more frequently screened because screening is linked to family planning and post-natal services. Hence older women, at greater risk, have a lower probability of being screened for cervical cancer within national programs. We therefore recognize that there is yet more work to be done in advocacy, policy formulation and program development in relation to the prevention and control of this disease.
Today, however, we can dream of a future in which the impact of cervical cancer would be greatly reduced as we have a new technology in the form of a vaccine, the HPV vaccine, to prevent cervical cancer. This efficacious tool has the potential to reduce the global cervical cancer burden by 70%, provided that we are able to achieve high coverage among poor vulnerable populations at risk for this disease. We welcome this new public health tool as it provides a fortuitous opportunity to improve women's health and reduce the impact of cervical cancer by investing in vaccination of our daughters, the women of the future. From a public health perspective, I would like to emphasize that comprehensive cervical cancer control is now possible through the dual application of vaccination of our young girls together with cervical screening of women.
We will have failed our daughters if as health professionals, vaccine manufacturers and governments we are unable to assure equitable access to affordable HPV vaccines for them. Let us therefore not deny them the benefit of a healthier future through improved cervical cancer prevention and control. Our degree of success in enabling new technologies, such as the HPV vaccine, to reach the most vulnerable and poorest girls and women will pave the way for the introduction of new technologies currently under development, for example microbicides, a gel or cream currently in clinical trials that aim to prevent the transmission of HIV.
On this International Women's Day, let us collectively commit ourselves, our institutions and our governments to ensure that the HPV vaccine will shortly be available, affordable and accessible to any girl or young woman that needs it. By doing so we are sending a very clear message to future generations of women - we are committed to eradicate health inequity, where women of the developing world must wait for 10 to 15 years for life-saving technology, which are already available to women in the developed world.
Let us each do our part to ensure that the future for girls is bright, equal, safe and rewarding. I thank you most kindly for your attention.
Mirta Roses Periago
