Thanks to the AHCA We Could Now See Cervical Cancer Rates Increase

By ILANA ADDIS, MD In 2014 I took my first trip to Kenya. After my plane landed in Nairobi I rode for 10 hours with my medical colleagues to Bungoma, a town on the western edge of the country. We set up our clinic in the local hospital and then spent the week training local healthcare providers on a technique called ‘Visual Inspection with Acetic Acid (VIA)’. This is an inexpensive method to screen for cervical cancer and pre-cancer in low resource settings using vinegar. As a part of the training we screened 189 women for cervical cancer in that week. The Papaniculou (pap) smear was revolutionary in cervical cancer prevention. The incidence of cervical cancer in the United States has decreased from 14.8 cases per 100,000 women in 1975 to only 6.5 cases per 100,000 women in 2012. However, despite this relative ease of screening for cervical cancer it is still a health crisis in less developed countries. Worldwide, approximately 500,000 new cases of cervical cancer and 274,000 deaths are attributable to cervical cancer yearly, making cervical cancer the second most common cause of death from cancer in women. Ninety percent of all cervical cancer deaths are in developing countries. Women die at an alarming rate from cervical cancer in places like Kenya and El Salvador. The countries in Africa, Central America, and similar countries around the world have a multitude of problems that make screening challenging: Difficulty with accessing qualified people to perform a pap smea...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Cervical Cancer MacArthur Amendment Source Type: blogs