The Beauty Blog

As soon as the National Lieutenant Governor’s Association launched a cervical cancer campaign in Wisconsin, its Lieutenant Governor Barbara Lawton broke with tradition.

The Duluth News Tribune reported that Lawton had sent brochures about cervical cancer and the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine to beauty salons but, oddly enough, not to health care clinics. The brochures were made available for free.

Businesswomen based in Wisconsin were in favor of the move made by Governor Lawton. They believed that beauty salons were the appropriate settings for making the information about the HPV vaccine available to the general public. Despite that most HPV infections clear up undetected due to the body’s immune system defenses,  it’s possible for some HPV types considered to be high risk to develop into cervical cancer.

About.com: Cancer states that:

Cervical cancer symptoms often go unnoticed. When symptoms are present, they usually do not appear until the cancer is more advanced. This does vary from woman to woman.

Thirty-four local salons listed in the phone book have showed support for the idea.

“HPV causes genital warts and cervical cancer, the second most-common cancer among women. Twenty million people in the United States are affected and another 6.2 million more get infected each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [....] It is an amazing opportunity to prevent our daughters from having cervical cancer,” Lawton said.

Let’s hope that this new tradition will stay for a long time!

Photo: © aflcio