Good news on the cervical cancer vaccine: “new trial results from one of the two companies in a race to get a vaccine on the market show that older women will be protected too, although only against those strains of HPV to which they have not yet been exposed”.

Although that SHOULD be only a temporary need, since if you vaccinated all girls against the virus then it should, I suggest, be easy to send it the way of smallpox. Well except of course that the religious nutters will never let it happen, since this is a – gasp – sexually transmitted disease, and so protecting women against it is, to their minds, definitely a bad idea.

Anne Szarewski, clinical consultant at Cancer Research UK, who is recruiting for a comprehensive trial of the vaccine in women over 26, said yesterday that the results were good news, not least because some parents may be reluctant to have their daughters vaccinated against a sexually transmissible disease.

“I think there is going to be so much to-ing and fro-ing about the ethics and morality of vaccinating 13-year-olds that I think it would be much easier if we can vaccinate women who can make up their own minds,” Dr Szarewski said.

Odd that no one says that about the german measles vaccine, routinely given to girls about that age.

Meanwhile, Saudi women are seeing some small advances, as set out in this Independent article. Being able to work in a women-only lingerie shop mightn’t sound like much of an advance, but at least it would allow the workers to escape the home. And I bet you’d end up with the world’s best-educated lingerie salespeople.

To some, the lingerie debate encapsulates the ideological clash between government reformists pushing for freedoms and mullahs who fear where this may take Saudi society. While the latter hasresisted change, sometimes with violence, it is the reformers who appear to be winning.

The country’s National Society of Human Rights helped to create the first shelter for victims of domestic violence a year ago, and more are on the way.