• 7/24/2007
  • Austin, TX
  • staff
  • Forbes.com

Heather Burcham, whose battle with cervical cancer led her to urge legislators to try to keep girls from sharing in her fate, has died of the disease. She was 31.

Burcham, of Houston, died Saturday.

“Her pain and suffering have forever ceased,” Gov. Rick Perry said Monday. He said she was “an inspiration to myself, my staff and others.”

Perry issued an executive order in February that would have required the newly approved human papillomavirus vaccine for girls entering the sixth grade, to help protect them from cervical cancer.

Members of the Legislature were outraged, complaining that Perry circumvented the legislative process, that the vaccine was too new and that making it mandatory could encourage young people to be sexually active. The human papillomavirus that causes cervical cancer is transmitted through sexual contact.

Burcham went to the Capitol to voice support for the vaccine in February. In April, legislators passed a bill blocking state officials from following Perry’s order.

In a May news conference to announce that he would not veto the bill, Perry closed with a video of Burcham speaking from her hospice bed.

With oxygen tubes snaking out of her nose, she spoke of the pain she had endured for four years. She also mourned for the husband she would never meet and the children she would never raise.

“If I could help one child, take this cancer away from one child, it would mean the world to me,” she said. “If they knew what I was going through, how incredibly painful that this was … then I feel like I’ve done my job as a human on this earth.”

Vaccination programs similar to the one blocked in Texas have been proposed in many states, but only Virginia has signed such a mandate into law.

Merck & Co.’s Gardasil, the only HPV vaccine on the market, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in June 2006. The federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices followed with a recommendation that all girls be vaccinated at age 11 or 12.

Cervical cancer kills 10 women a day in the U.S., and one in four U.S. women ages 14 to 59 is infected with HPV, according to a recent report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While Gardasil is not a magic bullet, it protects against the strains of HPV that cause 70 percent of cervical cancer cases.