WILL women in poor countries soon have access to a cervical cancer test like their richer sisters?
Almost all of the 250,000 women who die of cervical cancer each year live in poor countries where regular western-style screening is just too expensive. But using PCR to test for the strains of HPV that cause cervical cancer might be the answer. These HPV tests reveal early cancer even more reliably than the Pap tests familiar to most western women, so they needn鈥檛 be repeated as often. But they are more costly.
Now John Sellors at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and colleagues, have developed a 鈥渟treamlined鈥� HPV test they hope will cost just $5 a pop. When the team tried it on 2400 women in China, it flagged up 90 per cent of women with cervical cancer, making it only slightly less reliable than full-blown PCR (The Lancet, ). Peter Sasieni of says even testing poor women once or twice in their lives could halve deaths from cervical cancer.
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