By Leslie Gianelli
JHPIEGO

JHPIEGO has received a two-year award of more than $914,000 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to continue life-saving cervical cancer prevention work in Thailand and Ghana. Through the Cervical Cancer Prevention Outcomes Project, JHPIEGO will produce new findings on the feasibility, effectiveness and sustainability of strategies to prevent cervical cancer in low-resource settings.

Cervical cancer remains the No. 1 cause of cancer deaths among women in many developing countries. Each year more than 233,000 women worldwide die from the disease, the majority in developing countries, where women lack access to affordable and effective services for prevention, testing and treatment.

For 50 years, Pap smears have contributed significantly to the marked reduction in the incidence of cervical cancer among women in industrialized countries, but numerous obstacles hamper developing countries in maintaining such programs, which require extensive financial resources and health infrastructure.

In 2003 researchers from JHPIEGO and the Royal Thai College of Obstetrics & Gynaecology reported in The Lancet that a single-visit approach using VIA (for visual inspection with acetic acid) and immediate cryotherapy for abnormal cells that may be precancerous is safe, acceptable and feasible in low-resource settings. As a result of these findings, both Thailand and Ghana have endorsed this approach as an acceptable alternative to Pap smears.

With the new award, JHPIEGO will conduct an operations research study to assess programmatic outcomes of its demonstration projects in those countries.

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