This disease takes a terrible toll, and at an early age, and this is just one tragic example.
While I hope our contributions and messages have made things a little better for A-M in the circumstances, I'd like to suggest a further course of action on all our parts over the next few years that could help to reduce the number of future cases.
About 4/5 of cervical cancer cases are caused by HPV infections. The Gardasil vaccine can now PREVENT them. If you encourage your children, grandchildren, friends' children - boys and girls - to get this vaccine (privately at present), or not-bad-as-a-start, for girls to take up the standard, NHS-supplied, cheaper, and probably slightly less effective Cervarix, then there's a good chance that instead of this disease taking a toll of about 1:1000 women in future, it'll drop to 1:5000.
Smear tests are still necessary, but as we can see, sometimes detection and treatment doesn't work
. In the last few years, this new weapon has arrived to help reduce the chances of this happening to A-M's successors. I encourage you to try and make sure we all take best advantage of it.