If the HPV vaccination trend grows, Laura will have saved women’s lives

EARLY on, when the nun connection was mentioned, it was mentioned with a shrug, writes Terry Prone. 

It was proffered almost as a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not fact: Did you know nuns never get cervical cancer? They were regarded the way milkmaids were regarded a century earlier; seen as a group who were fortunate almost beyond logic. The milkmaids didn’t get smallpox, the great killer and disfigurer of the time. Then Edward Jenner divined that the reason the milkmaids didn’t get smallpox was that they got a much milder version known as cowpox, which rendered them immune to the more serious disease, and this insight leading to the development of the vaccine which eventually exterminated the smallpox horror.

A later generation knew about the nuns’ natural immunity — or apparent natural immunity — to cervical cancer, but it took a long, long time before the obvious conclusion was reached and everybody acknowledged cervical cancer to be a sexually transmitted disease. Which in turn meant that two methods of prevention presented themselves: Absolute lifelong abstention from sex, or the taking of a vaccine before the taker became sexually active. Specifically, taking the HPV vaccine.