Strategies for Health Interventions to Eliminate Infection related Cancers

The overall aim of the Joint Action “Strategies for Health Interventions to Eliminate Infection related Cancer” (SHIELD) is to decrease premature morbidity and mortality caused by communicable diseases, in particular cancers caused by infections and vaccinepreventable cancers. Combining different strategies into a comprehensive and effective prevention programme requires coordination among multiple and diverse stakeholders, including civil societies, public health authorities and institutions, social support structures, health systems and health scientists. A key focus will be on identifying and addressing possible structural and individual barriers preventing optimal programme performance and on identifying/developing and transferring/implementing promising practices. SHIELD aims to devise such an effective programme across the European continent by combining different complementary competencies that have worked within this area previously. The project addresses the priorities of the call by investigating how to make sure that all relevant preventive measures are being implemented at scale in different countries and identifying the barriers hampering implementation – both at structural and individual levels, and with a strong focus on the roles that stigma and discrimination play, particularly for HIV but also for other infections. Through application of modelling work, SHIELD also seeks to determine the optimal mix of preventive measures to be implemented in different countries and settings. The starting point is to do this across all primary, secondary, and tertiary preventive measures, rather than only focusing on vaccination coverage, to increase the impact of the available prevention options on decreasing cancers caused by infections.