Systematic review of the cost-effectiveness of the vaccination against HPV in Brazil

In Brazil, almost 16,000 new cases of cervical cancer (CC), the type of neoplasia that claims the more lives of young women than any other, are expected in 2014. Although the vaccine against HPV has been developed, the application of this strategies to large populations is costly, and its use in Brazil is limited. Studies of the economic implications of new preventive technologies for CC may support rational and evidence-based decisions in public health. A systematic search of articles published between 2000 and 2014 was conducted using MEDLINE, EMBASE, the Cochrane Collaboration of Systematic Reviews, and LILACS. The aim of this search was the identification of original articles that evaluated the cost-effectiveness of vaccination against HPV in Brazil. A total of 6 articles are included in this review, evaluating the addition of a vaccine against HPV in comparison to population screening. Although the vaccine against HPV increases the cost of preventing cervical cancer, this new preventive technology presents favorable cost-effectiveness profiles in the case of Brazil. Failure to utilize the newly available preventative technologies against CC can lead to misguided and perverse consequences in a country in which programs based on the Papanicolaou test have been only partially successful.