Stalking a silent killer

Medicine | The viruses leading to cervical cancer have gone underdiagnosed for too long; now, with a new vaccine, women—and girls—face ethical challenges over making use of it | Lynde Langdon

Eva Perón never knew what killed her. In the early 1950s, before patients' bills of rights and managed care, doctors and families commonly kept cancer diagnoses a secret from those afflicted. But Argentinian president Juan Perón went to great lengths to hide his wife's diagnosis of cervical cancer from her. He never told his wife before her death in 1952 that an American specialist performed her hysterectomy in place of her local doctor. Historians have speculated that the deception was part political maneuvering and part denial; President Perón did not want the country to learn of his misfortune in an election year, and his wife did not want to know.

But there was something neither Perón nor the public knew about Evita, even after a Broadway musical memorialized the story of her populism and humanitarianism. Her cancer was caused by a sexually transmitted virus that she most likely caught from her husband, whose first wife also died of cervical cancer.