URI professor wins grant to launch cervical cancer prevention campaign in West Africa using storytelling cloth

SOUTH KINGSTOWN – The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded a $100,000 grant to the Global Alliance to Immunize Against AIDS Vaccine Foundation to raise awareness about the prevention of cervical cancer in West Africa.
The money has been awarded to test whether distributing among women in West Africa a printed cloth that tells the story of the virus that causes cervical cancer can help prevent spread of the disease.
Founded by Dr. Anne De Groot, director of the University of Rhode Island’s Institute for Immunology and Informatics, the Global Alliance to Immunize Against AIDS Vaccine Foundation will distribute a patterned cloth that incorporates images of healthy uteruses surrounded by spikey viruses – also known as HPV, the human papillomavirus.
“We are putting the power of storytelling to work to fight cancer,” De Groot said. “Faced with the overwhelming lack of knowledge about cervical cancer in Africa and the availability of a vaccine that effectively prevents it, we felt we had to do something that had immediate impact. And there is no better way to do that in West Africa than make a statement with a fashionable outfit.”
The traditional textile, called a “Pagnes,” worn by most women in West Africa, is also used as a medium of communication. Its patterns tell stories.
The plan is to produce and distribute the cloth throughout West Africa, starting in Mali, De Groot said, creating jobs for local businesses and tailors, and generating a “fashion buzz” about the cloth that has the potential to transmit the message of vaccination and prevention to women who are at risk.
Cervical cancer is one of the most common and lethal cancers, with a 67 percent mortality rate among women in Africa, about five times higher than rates in the United States.
Two years ago, De Groot asked a student to help design a traditional African cloth to raise awareness in Mali about the connection between HPV and the prevention of cervical cancer. De Groot connected with Eliza Squibb, who graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2013 with a degree in textiles and spent time in North Africa and the Peruvian Amazon studying traditional textiles.
Squibb, who is now GAIA’s executive director, added the mantra, “I protect myself, I take care of myself and I immunize myself” in a banner across the cloth. Disguised in the vivid print are the images of fallopian tubes and uteruses surrounding near invasion of the HPV viruses embedded in abnormal cancerous cells.
Squibb and De Groot went to West Africa in July to show the fabric to doctors, scientists, health care workers and local women. The response was overwhelming. One man made it into a shirt the next day.
“They loved it,’’ says Squibb, who lives in Providence and grew up in Camden, Maine. “Not only did they want to wear the cloth right away, but they also wanted the vaccine.’’
Unless a woman understands the connection between the virus and her body, she has “no motivation to get tested,” said De Groot. ”These life-saving tests and vaccines are already available in the U.S. and Europe, and it is about time that they were available to West African women, too.”

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