Victorian diseases are back and killing children. HPV vaccine success shows a way out

The recent positive news on HPV vaccine figures shows what prevention can achieve when science, public health, and vaccine confidence work together.

Research has found that children vaccinated against HPV at 12 or 13 now have close to zero risk of dying from cervical cancer before the age of 30. For the first time on record, no women aged 20 to 24 died from cervical cancer in England between 2020 and 2024.

That is an extraordinary public health achievement. It is also a reminder of the choice before us. When vaccination programmes are strong, trusted, and widely taken up, they do not just prevent illness. They save lives, protect families from grief, and stop future pressure on the NHS before it begins.

But the return of diseases like measles shows the other side of that story.

This year, England has seen hundreds of confirmed measles cases and two measles-related child deaths. Behind those numbers are families and communities dealing with the consequences of a preventable infection.

The hardest truth is that these tragedies are not inevitable. They can be prevented by rebuilding confidence in and access to vaccination at home, as well as by recognising that Britain’s health security does not stop at our borders.

When vaccination programmes, disease surveillance, and outbreak response are weakened overseas, preventable infections are more likely to spread, mutate, and reach families here, too.

Protecting children in Britain means taking prevention seriously everywhere.

The latest measles figures in England are a devastating reminder that diseases many people thought belonged to the past are not safely behind us.

It’s not just measles – earlier this year, we saw a major outbreak of tuberculosis in an Amazon factory in Coventry. In March, polio was detected in London sewers just days after funding for global eradication efforts was cut.

These diseases are here, now, spreading in British communities, affecting children, and placing pressure on families and health services.

The return of infectious diseases like measles, polio, and TB is also a warning about what happens when prevention weakens. Vaccines – especially for diseases like measles – have been so successful that they have made many of us forget what they protect us from.

Prevention is easy to undervalue because, when it works, nothing happens. But the absence of crisis is not luck. It is the result of sustained investment, dedicated health workers, strong vaccination programmes, and effective surveillance.

That is true in Britain, and it is true globally. We cannot separate the health security of children in the UK from the systems that detect, prevent, and control disease elsewhere. Infectious diseases do not respect borders.

We have learned this repeatedly, from COVID-19 to more recent concerns about measles, polio, TB, Ebola, and other outbreaks. Weak surveillance, falling vaccination rates, and underinvestment in health systems anywhere create risks everywhere.

This is why global health investment should not be treated as charity detached from domestic priorities. It is part of how we protect families here at home.

Yet at the very moment these threats are becoming harder to ignore, the UK is reducing the investment that helps stop them at source. The aid budget has already fallen from 0.7% to 0.5% of gross national income and is now set to fall further to 0.3% by 2027/28.

The UK’s latest pledge to Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, is £1.25 billion for 2026-2030, down from £1.65 billion for 2021-2025. These are not abstract accounting choices. They mean less support for the vaccination programmes, surveillance systems, laboratories, and health workers that detect outbreaks early and prevent diseases like measles from spreading further and faster.

Research into vaccines, disease surveillance, laboratories, outbreak response, and the long-term effects of infection gives us the tools to act early, before crises grow.

British science and clinical expertise have played a major role in that work. We should be strengthening it, not allowing it to slip down the political agenda.

The HPV vaccine should be held up as proof of what is possible. It shows that when we invest in prevention, support trusted vaccination programmes, and make protection available before disease takes hold, we save lives on a scale that can be hard to see precisely because those lives are not lost.

Victorian diseases should not be claiming children’s lives in modern Britain – and the answer is not found only in Britain, but in the security we can, and should, foster through aid spending abroad, which funds invaluable programmes that protect others around the world, but also everyone here at home.

Prevention is not abstract. It is the difference between a child growing up healthy and a family living with the consequences of an avoidable infection. HPV shows us the lives vaccination can save. Measles shows us what happens when we forget that lesson.

And it is a lesson Britain cannot afford to forget.

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Professor Damian Roland is a consultant in paediatric emergency medicine and a member of the Healthy World, Secure Britain campaign.

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