Every year 300,000 women worldwide die from preventable cervical cancer. January 2022 is Cervical Cancer Awareness Month.

More than 300,000 women die each year worldwide from preventable cervical cancer and the World Health Organisation (WHO) this January renewed the 90-70-90 campaign, which aims to eliminate the scourge within a century.

"Cervical cancer is highly preventable and treatable. It could become the first cancer to be eliminated," said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has declared January 2022 as Cervical Cancer Awareness Month, with the aim of alerting people to the importance of cervical cancer and the great possibility of ending the disease.

Cervical cancer is largely preventable through vaccination and detection of precursor lesions, with appropriate follow-up and treatment, said IARC, an intergovernmental body under the auspices of the WHO.

Although preventable and treatable, cervical cancer is the second most common cause of cancer deaths in women of reproductive age worldwide, the WHO said at its headquarters here in Switzerland.

Some 604 000 women were diagnosed with cervical cancer worldwide in 2020, and 342 000 of them died from the disease.

Few conditions reflect inequalities as much as cervical cancer: almost 90 per cent of deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries.

In these nations, the incidence of the condition is higher because access to public health services is limited and screening and treatment have not been widely implemented.

That is why IARC and WHO are campaigning for every country to reach and maintain three targets, 90-70-90, in the lifetime of today's young women.

The first is for 90 per cent of girls to be vaccinated against the human papillomavirus by the age of 15.

The second is to ensure that 70 per cent of women are screened with a high-throughput test before the age of 35 and again before the age of 45.

The third is that 90 per cent of women with cervical lesions that may develop into cancer receive preventive treatment, and that 90 per cent of women with invasive cancer receive appropriate treatment.

Tedros called on all countries and WHO partners to increase access to human papillomavirus vaccination. The aim is to meet the 90-70-90 targets by 2030 "to set us on the path to eliminating cervical cancer in the next century".

As part of this initiative, IARC highlights three research projects that are part of the fight against cervical cancer, the first of which is to focus on areas of vaccination against high-risk types of human papillomavirus, the agent that causes most cases of cervical cancer.

The second project deals with treatment of pre-cancerous cervical lesions in a resource-limited setting, and the third with improving the coverage of cervical cancer screening programmes in at-risk populations.

When exposed to HPV, the body's immune system usually prevents the virus from doing harm. However, in a small percentage of people, the virus survives for years, contributing to the process that causes some cervical cells to become cancerous.

The risk can be reduced with screening tests and by receiving a vaccine that protects against HPV infection.

To remove this type of cancer from the list of public health problems, the IARC-WHO strategy set a threshold for all countries to achieve an incidence rate of less than four cases per 100,000 women.

Source: AmecoPress/SemMéxico/IPS.

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