Entrevista a Silvia de Sanjosé: “Hemos logrado que España sea puntera en la eliminación del cáncer de cuello uterino” – Blog

Silvia de Sanjosé Llongueras, a researcher associated with ISGlobal, will receive the Jaume I Prize for Clinical Research and Public Health in Autumn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sgjho5qgzg

Silvia de Sanjosé grew between the sewing machines of the parents textile industry, but soon he understood that he was not interested in production chains, but also a approach to people and among their needs. This was a study of medicine, a choice that today celebrates: although over time it has oriented its career to the study of populations, it is still guided by the same volunteer to value each person.

Recognized as those of the main international experiments in the Human Papillomavirus (HPV), its trajectory is marked by the research, the promotion of the vaccine and the impulse of screening programs. Has worked for the International Research Agency (IARC), the Catalan Institute of Oncology (ICO) and the International Organization PATHand presided over International Papilloma Virus Society (IPVS). Really advise at National Cancer Institute of the United States (NCI/NIH), la World Health Organization (WHO) and Doctors Without BordersIn addition to being an associated researcher in Isglobal, a professor affiliated at the University of Washington and president of the multidisciplinary collaborative group for the scientific monitoring of the COVID-19. In autumn you will receive the King Jau Of clinical research and public health.

-In Spain women today are much more protected against cervical cancer.

-We have a lot fought, we have taken many years to get where we are, but I like to reconcery that, in this cancer, we are in the front line. We are doing things well and we just need not to lower our guard.

-Do you feel part of this success?

-Lot. With Xavier Bosch and Xavi Castellsagué we were pioneers. I dedicated myself a lot to the Catalan community, and it is a pride that now the work investigators who did the congress doctorate continues. Catalonia is very avant -garde in the screening of cervical cancer. At the scientific level, it is a great leap to publish the first work that said that HPV is the cause of cervical cancer to worry about whether we put a unique dose of vaccine or see covomos the screening with the amomaestra. Then, I am also very satisfied to have been in teams in which, in addition to colleagues, we are friends. The good professional relationship that exists in the papilloma community is very comforting.

-What is there to be done?

-The great conquest have been vaccines. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, England and Scotland have already published how, in less than twenty years, the incidence of cervical cancer is going down in the vaccinated population. It is specific. This cancer is the most frequent room in women around the world and the one who kills more than 50 years of age. In Spain a very notable decrease in genital vrucas has been observed when the quadrivalent vaccine has been used. But the total reduction of cervical cancer attributable to vaccines will be seen by 2070. Meanwhile, a gynecological consultations still arrive in non -vaccinated women who are not uncommon. It is not uncommon to detect an lesion of the deleterin deleterine infection by HPV, and this injury can lead to cancer.

-In Africa that often happens.

-There happens with 90% of women. The incidence of cervical cancer is a great social indicator. Where there are very high rates, there is a lot of poverty or lack of infrastructure.

35 years dedicated to HPV and its impact on health

-Are you always linked to cervical cancer?

-In 1989 I went to work at the IARC, in Lyon. There I participated in the first studies that demonstrated the relationship between HPV and cervical cancer. Since then I am studying how to prevent this cancer!

-I don’t have tired?

-No! At all! I medical family. But, in a Congress, Dr. Armando Martín Zurro told us that what we saw in the consultation was the tip of the iceberg, that the people who did not go to the consultation perhaps had more problems of the yes. It was like seeing the light! In 1984 I entered the Municipal Institute of Public Health of BarcelonaTo work with Josep Maria Antó. Desperate I went to the London Tropical Medicine and Tropical Medicine A Master in Epidemiology, and I stayed there to do the doctorate.

-You did to act as a family doctor, then.

-Two years at the General Hospital of Alicante (1981-82) and the third in a primary school center in Cornellà (1983). I have always missed clinical practice, because I really liked contact with people. In the emergency department of the Clinic Hospital in Barcelona, ​​during the residence, I also made many hours of guard, and it was very happy, but the treatment with the patients seemed hard, not very researcher. I thought that each of them could be my father or my mother. That’s why I went to family medicine, to be able to interact with people as I liked it. When you do community health, you already have another vision, sometimes a bit too distant from the population. But, well, little by little I have been transforming my way of working and every time I do it closer to people’s teams and the realities of people.

Do not lose sight of people

-How do you do it to approach them? You were recently in the Amazon, for example.

-Yeah. In the project that we are carrying out in nine countries we collaborate a lot with the groups that make the screening of uterine body cancer. I try to travel whenever I can, although I can, to visit the places and have very contact with nursing, coordinators of the field, gynecologists … a often slopes communicate with the population, for the language, but sit down and I passed to communicate as the population, by the language, but sit and hurry to do with the population, for the idio, but sit hobn in tea visits a bit about them. I learn a lot.

-You go far professionally but keeping your feet on the floor.

-Look, I was a season president of the International Papilloma Virus Society. Experience helped me an incoming who had to get closer to the problem of health inequality. I needed a personal change. For two years I entered a sieve project of the cervical cancer of the NGO Path, focused on Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala. Already root of this work, they contacted me from the National Institute of Cancer of the United States (NCI), to cast the multinational project PaveWhich seeks to validate innovative and low cost methods for the prevenue of cervical cancer in places with little infrastructure or difficult to access for medical services. Since then I am working on this project, which has not stopped or with the Covid-19 pandemic.

The cake cherry

-What do you think they give you the Jaume I award?

-I understand it as a recognition a line of work, with an important international component and at the time of the time. I am proud because I have been working for many years in an important health problem. And doing so in a public health framework, studying the community, provides a deeper knowledge of happiness than if we only had the clinical vision of symptomatological demand, that is, individual. Preview who can develop cooling and act before this is pass, with high effectiveness, is miy necessary and stimulating. The luck of founding people who believed in this way of understanding medicine. They have helped me a lot, we have helped each other among us and this has paid off. This award is a celebration to all this effort. And I like to remember that my mentor Xavier Bosch also received it many years ago and that it is the second time he goes to Isglobal, because last year’s award went to Jordi Sunyer.

-Are there to emphasize that, in addition, he rewards a woman?

-The visibility of women in research has improved, although parity is not the best objective. I have no doubt that the Jaume I awards have prioritized science and not the sex of the researcher, but I am happy that they have awarded four women. In medicine and research there are more women than men, and the corresponding visibility is expected to be a corresponding visibility.

-Is that you have to leave the family a poop to dedicate yourself to the investigation?

-Manolis Kogevinas and I have two children, and we did our best so that the work was compatible with family life. For example, we had a very detailed agenda so that our work trips did not coincide. The first night we left them alone I think my eldest son was already 16 years old. They complain that we have worked too much. It is true that we have vivid our work with passion and it may be part of the leisure time we also dedicate it to work more than they would have liked.