According to the Pan American Health Organization's Silvana Luciani, "New technologies for cervical cancer prevention are revolutionizing public health." Yet the vaccine for human papillomavirus (HPV) is contested, in part because it evokes politics of contagion that foreground intimate transmissibility As a preventive technology, the vaccine promises to reduce rates of cervical cancer by controlling the spread of the causal agent, infectious HPV. It is already reshaping sexual politics and health care relations in the United States and is poised to similarly alter public health practices globally. This essay examines the HPV vaccine's impact on transnational women's health, specifically its role in the emergence and consolidation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) focused on women's sexuality and reproduction, its impact on cervical cancer screening, and expectations it arouses regarding pandemic HIV.
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Carpenter et al. (2009) studied this question.