“India has launched the largest HPV vaccination drive in history, targeting 12 million teenage girls a year in an effort to tackle sky-high rates of cervical cancer.

Roughly one in four global cases of cervical cancer, which is caused almost exclusively by infection by human papillomavirus (HPV), is reported in India.

Every year over 130,000 Indian women are diagnosed with it and some 80,000 die of the disease.

Now, the Indian government will offer free HPV vaccinations to all 14-year-old girls – roughly 11.5 million of them – in the country every year.

The campaign, which began last week, will mostly use a jab known as Gardasil-4, a single-dose shot manufactured by US pharmaceutical company Merck & Co and proven to slash cases of cervical cancer by 90 per cent by protecting against the most dangerous strains of HPV – type 16 and 18.”

From Telegraph.