Two girls in Port Moresby roll up their sleeves against a cancer that kills 650 a year

Remax Daniel and Dulcie Philip, both 13 and in Grade Five at New Erima Primary School, were among the first to receive Papua New Guinea's national HPV vaccine. Cervical cancer kills about 650 women in the country each year. The single dose protects against the virus strains behind roughly 90 percent of cases.

More than a thousand women in Papua New Guinea are diagnosed with cervical cancer each year, and about 650 die of it. The country has no national screening programme — testing has existed only in scattered pilot studies over the past decade. For most women, the disease is found late or not at all.

What treatment exists sits in a single building. The National Cancer Centre at Angau Memorial Hospital in Lae holds the country's only radiotherapy equipment, and for roughly ten years it held nothing usable: the machine had failed. The service reopened in August 2024, with a second-hand replacement shipped from Canada. Brachytherapy — the internal radiation step central to cervical cancer treatment — began there this year. The first patient was a woman with cervical cancer.

The vaccine arrived through Gavi and UNICEF, which delivered a first shipment of 100,000 vials, with 180,000 more expected. From November, Phase 1 will spread across the National Capital District and Central Province before reaching other provinces — including, through health facilities and community outreach, girls who are not in school and those living far from any road.

That last part is the hard part. Papua New Guinea runs one of the weakest routine immunisation systems in the world: DTP3 coverage stood at 42 percent in 2024, first-dose measles at 44 percent, against global averages above 84. A vaccine that requires one dose rather than three is not a small administrative convenience here. It is the difference between a campaign that can be finished and one that cannot.

Modelling suggests PNG could reach the elimination threshold by 2085 if vaccination and screening are both scaled up. Neither Remax nor Dulcie will see that year. Their daughters might.