With all cancers one can readily demonstrate the link between the chemical and radiation causes of the disease, but there is one that is an exception. It is the cuckoo in the nest. This is Cervical Cancer and this is universally attributed to having been caused by a virus. The following comment found in the Medline Medical Encyclopedia is typical: "Almost all cervical cancers are caused by HPV (human papillomavirus). HPV is a common virus that is spread through sexual intercourse. There are many different types of HPV, and many do not cause problems. However, only certain strains of HPV actually lead to cervical cancer." ¹

     Mayo clinic expands on this a little more by saying, "Human papillomavirus (HPV), a sexually transmitted infection, is the most common cause of cervical cancer. When a woman is exposed to HPV, her immune system usually prevents the virus from doing any harm. But in a small number of women, the virus survives for years and eventually converts some cells on the surface of the cervix into cancer cells. These changes happen very slowly. At first, the cells only show signs of a viral infection. Later, the cells become precancerous. Doctors refer to this as cervical intraepithelial neoplasia. In time, it progresses to invasive cervical cancer. It's not clear why some women are more likely to develop cervical cancer." ²

     The two aformentioned comments are very revealing because although HPV is said to cause cervical cancer not everyone who has the virus will get the disease. The answer to this paradox is simple. HPV does not cause cervical cancer! I shall prove beyond any doubt that what I have said is true but before proceeding with the evidence to support that herectical statement, let us take a look at some background information about the disease. Clues to the cause of the disease can be found within the information that now follows.

     Worldwide, cervical cancer is the third most common type of cancer in women. According to the NCCC (National Cervical Cancer Coalition) about 14,000 women in the United States are diagnosed with the disease each year and more than 3,900 women die in each year from this disease. However, the number of women getting the disease in the western world is very few when compared to the rest of the world. Women in developing countries account for about 85% of both the yearly cases of cervical cancer (estimated at 493,000 cases worldwide) and the yearly deaths from cervical cancer (estimated at 273,500 deaths worldwide). In fact, whereas breast cancer is the leading cancer for women in the west, in the majority of developing countries, cervical cancer remains the number-one cause of cancer-related deaths among women. ³ Keep these statistics in mind because what they tell us is very important as far as determining the cause of cervical cancer is concerned.

     Cervical cancer starts in the cells on the surface of the cervix. There are two types of cells on the cervix's surface: squamous and columnar. The majority of cervical cancers originate within squamous cells. The development of cervical cancer is very slow and starts as a pre-cancerous condition called dysplasia. This pre-cancerous condition can be detected by a Pap smear and is 100% treatable. Undetected, the pre-cancerous changes can develop into cervical cancer and spread to the bladder, intestines, lungs, and liver. However, it can take many years for pre-cancerous changes to turn into cervical cancer, if they do at all. Normally, most women are unaware that cervical cancer is growing inside them, until symptoms begin to appear when the cancer is in its advanced stages and has spread. That is why it is so important for women to get regular Pap smears. Most women that are diagnosed with cervical cancer today have not had regular Pap smears or they have not followed up on abnormal results.

Questions

     Initially I was taken aback by the revelation that a virus caused cervical cancer but then I began to wonder what it was that led the medical profession to almost unanimously adopt this idea when all other cancers clearly showed that chemicals (or radiation) was responsible. As I looked into this more deeply, I came across a most perplexing riddle. You see, what set doctors along a path in search of a viral cause of the disease was triggered by an obscure report in a regional medical journal in Venice. It was made by an Italian surgeon and an amateur epidemiolist named Rigoni-Stern in 1842. He had analysed 150,000 death certificates from the Veronese district for the years 1760-1839 and found that out of 74,184 women who died, 1288 of them were nuns. The cause of death of the nuns varied but many had died of breast cancer, five times more common than other women. (Incidently, he correctly attributed one of the reasons for the increase in breast cancer in nuns compared to other women was due to the corsets they wore). He recorded four deaths from utrine cancer (cervical cancer was not distinquished from other cancers of the uterus), while he had expected at least six based on 361 cases in the remaining 72,896 women. ³

     From this somewhat vague analysis, others saw this data as evidence that there was little or no cervical cancer among Catholic nuns compared with the rest of the Italian female population. Subsequent doctors endeavoured to expand on this obscure report, adding various invented details, including the idea that cervical cancer in prostitutes was prevelant. So arose the myth that as nuns were supposed to be celibrate and yet cervical canser was rare among them, and that the disease was said to be quite common among prostitutes this could only mean one thing. Cervical cancer was caused by something that was sexually tranmitted and it was not long before this specualation became accepted as fact. Professor Skranbanek puts things in perspective when he said that, "A reference to an obscure Italian communication has become a de riguer in the opening paragraphs of articles on the aetiology of cervical cancer, but how many authors have read the orignal? For example, an early culprit wrote: "Speculation on the relationship of marriage to onset of cervical cancer goes back to 1842, when Rigoni-Stern proposed that the non-married status of Catholic Sisters as a reason for an associated low frequency. Subsequent authors, copying from each other, gradually embelleshed the nun's tale, adding various invented details." ⁴

Professor Skranbanek Exposes a Myth

Professor Petr Skranbanek (1940-1994)

READ THE BOOKS BELOW FOR FREE Please note that they will take a long time to download because of their size.

False Premises, False Promises (20MB PDF)

Follies and Fallacies in Medicine (12MB PDF)

The Death of Humane Medicine (53MB PDF) Skranbanek books are available for downloading and viewing as a PDF. I would like to thanks the original publishers for making them available.

     As a historian I am often amazed how something that I have read which is obscure and unfounded can be transformed into holy writ so that later generations do not know the difference between what is fact and what is fiction. In this particular case, those in the medical profession have fallen foul of the same trap. They have followed a line of research, a false trail as it turns out, in search of a viral cause for cervical cancer, when in fact there is none.

     The famous scientist Voltaire (1694-178) once said that "It is dangerous to be right on a subject on which the established authorities are wrong", and so I know that I tread on dangerous ground when I disagree with the accepted view. But the facts speak for themselves. The search for the cause of cervical cancer is based upon a false premise that nuns were less prone to the disease than other women while for prostitutes the opposite was true. Who am I to make such a claim, one that is odds with about every medical professional in the world? I am a nobody, but I am not alone. I have powerful allies who share my views, professionals whose reputations have no equal. I call upon Professor Petr Skrabanek (1940-1994) as my first witness.

     Professor Tom O'Dowd decribed Petr Skrabanek "as was one of the most internationally known members of the medical faculty in Trinity College and counted many leading thinkers in medicine and science as admirers. He displayed courage in challenging dogma and rigour in exposing fallacy. His several hundred publications demonstrated his breadth of scholarship and ability to communicate with learned and popular publications in a number of languages. His papers have appeared in many international refereed journals and he was a regular editorialist for the Lancet. He was regularly invited by leading international scientists to address major symposia and seminars in Europe and the United States. ⁵ The Times said, "Skrabanek believed that wrong ideas flourished in medicine because it is an authoritarian institution that has to present a façade of systematic knowledge. Doctors find it difficult to admit their ignorance or that there may not be a solution to medical problems." ⁶

     Petr Skrabanek was born in Náchod in the Czech Republic on the 27th October 1940. While still at school, he developed an interest in chemistry and in 1957 he entered Charles University in Prague to read natural sciences. While still a student he worked as an honorary research assistant in the Institute for Toxicology and Forensic Medicine in Prague. He graduated in 1962 and was appointed Head of the Toxicology Department in the Institute for Forensic Medicine, Purkyne University in Brno. At the same time he became a regular contributor to the Chemical Abstracts and also to Vesmír (Cosmos), a natural science journal in Czechoslovakia, writing short articles dealing with interesting events and discoveries in Western science.

     In 1963, Petr began his medical studies at Purkyne University. In 1967, as an outstanding student he was selected to spend a month in Galway Regional Hospital. He fell in love with Ireland and a year later, in July 1968, he returned to spend a month in a Dublin teaching hospital. His wife Vera joined him in Ireland for a brief holiday and it was while they were on the West coast that they heard the news of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Their experience of totalitarianism strengthened their decision to remain in Ireland. Soon they found themselves surrounded by a number of new friends who showed great kindness and support and Petr was able to find a post as a Research Fellow in the Medical Research Council Laboratories in Dublin.

     A year later he was admitted to the Royal College of Surgeons to finish his medical studies and he qualified in 1970. From 1971 to 1975 he worked as an intern, senior house officer and finally registrar in neurology in Dublin hospitals. In 1975 he joined the Endocrine Oncology Research team in the Mater Hospital as a Senior Research Fellow and became involved in research into the neurotransmitter Substance P. He also found time to complete his doctoral thesis Inappropriate production of hormonal peptides in neoplasia. His publications began to deal with issues of more general concern and he was invited to write occasional editorials for the Lancet.

     In 1984, he joined the Department of Community Health in Trinity College, initially in a temporary capacity, aided by a grant from the Wellcome Foundation. He immediately began to establish his position as an original, cogent, and fearless critic, particularly in relation to preventive medicine. He was rapidly promoted from lecturer to senior lecturer and finally to associate professor. He was made a Fellow of Trinity College and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland.

     Clearly then, with such a background Petr SKrabanek is someone whose views should not be taken lightly. The Irish Times said that his "premature death deprived medicine of one of its most cogent critics whose views were taken seriously by thinking physicians throughout the world." That being the case what was his view regarding the the accepted connection between nuns and cervical cancer. In his book False Premises, False Promises he said, "An expert answering a reader's query in a medical weekly stated about carcinoma of the cervix that "it is now well documented that the disease is rare in nuns and common in prostitutes", adding, somewhat cryptically, that "a connection between intercourse and cervical cancer was apparently suggested in 1842". Both statements are false but widely believed to be true, presumably because they suggested they support what they believe to be proved." ⁷ [bold mine]

     In Chapter seven of his book SKrabanek elaborates what he means. He shows that Rigoni "made no comments on the "rarity" of cervical cancer in nuns, as cervical cancer was not yet distinquished from other cancers of the uterus". Death from four cases of uterine cancer was recorded when six was anticipated. SKranbanek thought that the very low numbers of this and other cancers in Rigoni's data suggested under diagnosis. Rigoni's findings was therefore hardly a sound basis upon which to establish a direction of research that has continued to this day. The entire chapter of Skranbanek's book, which was originally published as a seperate paper in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology in 1988 now focused upon the vain attempts by others to support the erroneous hypothesis that Rigoni had unintentionally instituted. Skranbanek also looked into the other side of the coin, and said that "the paucity of good data on cevical cancer in prostitutes is even more striking than nuns." In conclusion, SKrabanek writres that, "The epidemiological evidence on the prevalence of cervical cancer in nuns and prostitutes is very poor quality and neither supports nor contradicts belief that cervical cancer is a venereal disease. The evidence is so poor that it should not be used as additional "evidence" for a hypothesis which remains to be proved. Failure to distinguish hypotheses from facts delays clarification of the problem of the aetiology of cervical cancer" ⁸

Dr Griffith Investigates

     When SKranbanek published his findings in 1988 concerning the erroneous belief that nuns had a very low incidence of cervical cancer when compared to the rest of the female population it raised a few eye brows but little else happened. This was quite understandable under the circumstances. For over a hundred years, the search for "the virus" that was supposed to cause cervical cancer had consumed immense resources, both in time and money. Reputations were at stake and few were prepared to deviate from the chosen path that had already been taken, even though that path may have been been triggered by an erroneous report. Besides, Skranbanek was considered by some as a maverick and an outsider. "From his base at Trinity College, Dublin a stream of scientific papers and articles exposed the claims of public health doctors, epidemiologists, dietary evangelists and others that many diseases were preventable. This was not a popular message and he evoked strong antipathy in certain circles which was more than offset by the respect of his many admirers around the world." ⁹

     One doctor however, decided to carry out his own investigation into Skranbanek's findings and published a paper entitled "Nuns, spinsters and virgins" - Rigoni-Stern and cervical cancer revisited". It was published in the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in 1991. Doctor Malcolm Griffiths who wrote the paper is a consultant and the clinical director of obstetrics & gynaecology at Luton & Dunstable Hospital. It was while he was working on his MD thesis in a genito-urinary medicine clinic that he became interested in HPV and CIN (cervical intra-epithelial neoplasia). The laboratory work was under Dennis McCance, who then was a guru of HPV lab methods. It was during this time that Griffiths kept coming across a number of papers which cast doubts on ideas concerning cervical screening. For example the oberservation of the fall in Cancer of the Cervix incidence in Canada preceeding the introduction of PAP screening pointed to something else being responsible for the decline, but he did not know what. He was also coming across many findings which tended to contradict "established truths" - particularly about sexual transmission and the so-called "high risk male". He then came upon the article written by Petr Skrabanek. "He'd written an article about the Rigoni Stern story. Through him I obtained a copy of the original article (he of course could read in Italian!), I got it translated by an "ex" who lives in Italy (not realising it had actually been published in translation in an obscure epidemiology journal)." ¹⁰

     With the translation Griffiths set about a critical appraisal of that paper and all subsequent papers on the incidence of cervical cancer in nuns. He then paid the national census office to search for registered deaths among women who were members of religious orders who had died of cervical cancer. This gave him a numerator. To get a denominator, he corresponded with the heads of both the Roman Catholic & Anglican churches in England who gave him details of numbers of nuns by year end. From this he was able to calculate the incidence of deaths from Cancer of the Cervix among nuns, although at this time there was no correction for age. Having written his thesis he sent it to David Paintin, the then editor of the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. It was accepted within a couple of weeks for publication in the journal. Griffith's conclusion was that an, "estimate of the actual mortality rate from cervical cancer suggests that risk of death from this neoplasm among nuns is little different from that among the general female population."

     What all this means is that the findings of Professor Petr Skrabanek and Dr Griffiths completely contradicts the otherwise accepted view regarding the initial evidence for the connection between sexual activity and cervical cancer. Consequently, we are faced with an incredulous situation. All efforts to track down the cause of this disease has been directed towards finding a "virus" based upon this erroneous hypothesis. Meanwhile, the real cause of cervical cancer has been staring the medical elite in the face all along, evidence that has been ignored in favour of an theory that has become institutional fact. Needless to say, if you expend all your efforts to search for a virus, sooner or later you are going to find one - even if it has nothing to do with the disease. When the HPV (Human Papilloma Virus) was discovered it seemed to fit the bill. But did it really?