Only One in Five Women in Developing World Receive Effective Cervical Cancer Screening | Voice of America - English
In the past, cervical cancer was one of the leading cancer killers of women around the world. The cancer occurs on the opening of the uterus ? it's a location not easily detected by a woman until it's too late. The number of cervical cancer deaths has changed in the 1950s since the widespread introduction of the Pap test. The test is named after a Greek doctor, Georgios Papanikolaou, who found that examining a sample of cells taken from the cervix could identify cancer very early.
The data comes from a set ofsurveys carried out by the World Health Organization in 2002 and 2003.Surveyors went door to door in dozens of developing countries to askwomen if they had ever had a pelvic exam or a Pap test. DoctorZiad Obermeyer from the University of Washington examined this data."If you look at whether or not the respondents have ever had a pelvicexam, that number was at about 70 percent in developed countries and at45 percent in the developing world," he says. "In some of thesecountries the rates were just staggeringly low. If you look at rates inEthiopia, Bangladesh, or Burma, Myanmar, 90 percent of women had neverhad a pelvic exam. And only 1 percent of women had been effectivelyscreened." Obermeyer says these numbers are consistent withwhat's already known: most of the world's deaths from cervical cancertake place in developing countries. The World Health Organizationestimates there are about half a million cases worldwide every year,and about half those women die from the disease. Obermeyersays changing this screening rate will be challenging. "I think thatthe one bottom line from our paper, which is highlighted by the factthat there is such a variety of screening practices, is that there isnot going to be a one-size-fits-all strategy that will work for everycountry." Obermeyer says some of these countries would be goodplaces for use of the new cervical cancer vaccine. But the vaccineremains quite expensive and still, women need to be checked with aneffective cervical cancer test after several years. He says in someplaces, there are cultural obstacles to providing this test for women.Other places are more open to doing more screening ? but they needbetter laboratory facilities and more health care personnel. Obermeyer's paper is published in the online journal