Humour is often the key. My YouTube page is called “Seventh Planet” (spoiler: it’s Uranus). My email avatar is a peach. At the annual Sydney Mardi Gras Fair Day, I have a stall with “George” – a latex dummy with an artificial anus – and invite passers-by to put on some gloves, grab some lube, and insert their fingers into George to try to detect internal lumps and bumps. Hilarity often ensues.
On one occasion, I was invited to a gay nudist event in western Sydney. I stood, fully clothed, surrounded by 100 young, naked gay men in and around a swimming pool while I told them about how to check themselves and what symptoms to watch out for.
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We reach hundreds of at-risk men and spread a message of prevention by making it a fun thing. Anal cancer is almost entirely preventable among high-risk groups through screening. Vaccinations for HPV (human papillomavirus) – the cause of anal cancer – will slowly make the disease a thing of the past for most young Australians who receive it while at school.
While anal cancer is rare in the general population, in certain population subgroups – such as gay men or people living with HIV or other immunity problems – the rates of anal cancer are up there with bowel, prostate and breast cancer.
I would love to see a commitment from federal and state governments to fund targeted screening for these groups. But that’s only half the battle. If we introduced screening tomorrow, I wouldn’t have the team needed to manage the deluge of cases that would flow.
I have 400 people on my small clinic’s waiting list. If I did nothing else, it would take nine months to clear. I’m 67. I would like to start thinking about retirement, but there’s no one to take my place. We need to also start bringing on a new generation of trained specialists.
But in the meantime … can we start being more open about our anuses?
Professor Richard Hillman is one of Australia’s few specialists treating anal cancer. He runs the anal cancer clinic at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney.
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