Cervical Cancer - Another Virus-induced Problem
What does a virus want? I already explained what a virus is but what is the final goal of a virus if one can even say it has a goal?
A virus wants to multiply and be transferred to another host. Being extremely deadly doesn’t help that goal but the fact that virus infections still kill thousands of people (if not millions) every day shows that the “goal” isn’t always met. Something went wrong.
In the case of cervical cancer, something goes wrong too. HPV, the human papillomavirus is the culprit for this type of cancer. Like with HIV and herpes there are, again, more than one virus strain involved but the details would be too extensive for a Steemit post (there are over 120 different ones!).
HPV usually attacks skin cells and the cells of mucous membranes. It needs the cell to constantly synthesize new DNA and proteins so that new viruses can be built. But skin cells are lazy, they’ve usually already stopped multiplying and just wait until they slowly dry up and die. The papillomavirus deactivates certain mechanisms inside the cell (for example the p53 gene which suppresses cancer growth) which kicks the host cell back into a cycle of DNA replication and cell division. @suesa
I think you can see yourself how uncontrolled growth of cells that aren’t supposed to grow anymore can be bad.
The virus does several other things that damage the cell’s normal functions which leads to mutations very easily. The usual safeguard mechanisms are turned off and cancer can form easily.
But what can be done?
Luckily, there are several things we can do to prevent cervical cancer. In some cases, the body can get rid of the infection itself (over the span of a year). For some HPV strains, there is a vaccination but it’s only effective before an infection has happened. In Australia, the number of women with genital warts (also HPV induced) has dropped to almost 0 after vaccinating them all. As a side effect, genital warts in men dropped too!
But what if there is already an infection and it doesn’t vanish by itself again? After all, cervical cancer is the third main cancer-related cause of death in women worldwide.
Luckily, this sort of cancer grows comparably slow. If it’s detected, the affected cells can just be cut out of the cervix, if they’re caught early enough. So please girls and women, go to your gynecologist checkups one to two times a year!
Source:
Lecture “Tumor – Virus – Immune System : Human Papillomavirus” by Sigrun Smola
Picture taken from pixabay.com, sketch by me
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Hey @suesa, are you familiar with the people from the University of Jena?
They have developed an epigenetic screening test to estimate/determine in advance whether a HPV infection will also induce cervical cancer. It can detect the characteristic genetic alteration caused by the virus which can lead to cancer and is supposedly very accurate:
http://www.oncgnostics.com/gyntect-cervical-cancer/?lang=en
That's really neat! Thanks for the link :)
its have been great explanations i have ever seen about virus well done and thank you for sharing
You're welcome ;)
Of course it does not prevent the cancer but time and information advantages are always valuable when dealing with it. In addition if the test proves to be very specific (that is giving few false positive results) one can avoid many unnecessary operations to remove potentially cancerous tissue which in fact is only HPV infected but not cancerous.
Great post :)
I live in the UK and women cannot have the test for cervical cancer under the age of 25.
I know that there statistics are very low for women to be diagnosed with cervical cancer under the age of 25 but still... HOW REDICULOUS.
This is much annoyance to my girlfriend who is 24. And been wanting to have the test for several years but not been allowed too.
Have a great day too all :)
As a woman who has seen first hand what cervical cancer is capable of, I am grateful for this post. East and Sub Sahara Africa remain the region with the highest incidences of cervical cancer in the world affecting women at their prime. There are no enough screening programs for early detection of cervical cancer for most African countries. Most screening activities are done as research projects which are discontinued due to funds and such. I guess South Africa is the only country here that has the quality equipment to fully handle cervical cancer.
Thank you for the science lesson as usual :)
My grandma died of it that's why I never got to meet her...anyways thanks for sharing women should never take for granted of their health even girls like me
Hi Suesa,
this is a topic very close to my heart as my sister was diagnosed with Cevical Cancer earlier this year. I do believe that more awareness needs to be brought to this type of Cancer as woman of all ages seem to be affected by it. There is alot of research linking the cause to HPV but I believe it goes further then that as well. My sister was given a pamphlet from the health board telling her that it is sexually transmitted and can be a result of multiple partners. Even though this was not that case or her it left her feeling very bad and humiliated. She was worried that other people would be thinking that. This is not the type of information you need to be reading when given a diagnosis of Cancer. In Ireland young women where vaccinated and became very ill. Personally for me it's difficult to know what to promote, but it is important to talk about these things and I thank you for bringing awareness to this type of Cancer,
I work in pediatrics and the HPV vaccine is our least given vaccine. It's so frustrating. I live in Utah, so I hear, "Oh they're not even doing that stuff yet." Then I say, "Well, yippy wouldn't put your rain coat on outside, in the middle of a storm. You put it on BEFORE you go outside. Just like you want to get your kids vaccinated BEFORE they become interested in sex." I get so tired of the willful ignorance.
Guys can prevent the spread of HPV which leads to cervical cancer by getting the vaccination. Which reminds me, I have my shot coming up :)
Very responsible of you!
Very responsible of you!
Hi @suesa, This post really hit home, my girlfriend's mum past away from cervical cancer. Thank you so much for letting the community know about it and encouraging female users to have a regular check up:)
Hi @suesa. Very informative article. I was wondering if it were possible that other types of cancer are being caused by perhaps undiscovered viral mechanisms. If one virus has evolved the ability to rewrite our genetic code (e.g., to instruct skin cells to start growing again but in abnormal ways), what's to stop viruses from doing so?
Of course! HPV itself can also cause skin cancer. A herpes virus is known to cause Hodgkin's lymphoma. Hepatitis can cause liver cancer. And the list goes on!
Our immune system can fight a lot, there is a lot we can vaccinate against. Medicine is advancing constantly. We might not be able to cure every cancer yet, induced by viruses or not, but we're getting there I'm sure.
That makes sense. And maybe researchers will find additional virus-cancer links in the future. Who knows, maybe we'll even be able to manufacture viruses that can rewrite the genetic code of other viruses.
I'll have to start following you more. I'm interested in steemstem topics and medicine, especially gene therapy.
My field is artificial intelligence and machine learning and I'm actively doing research in the area of computer vision. Feel free to give me any writing tips you might have if you get a chance to read my blog. I'm new to Steemit and still learning the ropes.
I'm also posting science fiction stories so don't be confused :D
As for advice, I recommend joining the steemSTEM channel on steemit.chat to make some friends.
Hey thanks. Is steemit.chat the same as discord? I recall reading about that somewhere.
No it's different, you can type steemit.chat into your url bar and it takes you there :)
Cool, thanks!
Hi @suesa. Thank you for the article, it's really useful to me as a young girl. It's much easier to understand it when it's explained by somebody rather than from a medical website, since those explanations tend to be really stuffy. I really appreciated this information, it's very important that people are aware of this.