Interventions to close the divide for women with breast and cervical cancer between low-income and middle-income countries and high-income countries.
Breast and cervical cancers are the commonest cancers diagnosed in women living in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs), where opportunities for prevention, early detection, or both, are few. Yet several cost-effective interventions could be used to reduce the burden of these two cancers in resource-limited environments. Population- wide vaccination against human papillomavirus (HPV) linked to cervical screening, at least once, for adult women has the potential to reduce the incidence of cervical cancer substantially. Strategies such as visual inspection with acetic acid and testing for oncogenic HPV types could make prevention of cervical cancer programmatically feasible. These two cancers need not be viewed as inevitably fatal, and can be cured, particularly if detected and treated at an early stage. Investing in the health of girls and women is an investment in the development of nations and their futures. Here we explore ways to lessen the divide between LMICs and high-income countries for breast and cervical cancers.
Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town, South Africa. Electronic address: lynette.denny@uct.ac.za.
Lynette
L
Denny
Cancer Epidemiology Research Programme, Catalan Institute of Oncology, IDIBELL, L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Barcelona, Spain; CIBER en Epidemiología y Salud Pública (CIBERESP), Barcelona, Spain.
Silvia
S
de Sanjose
Department of Surgery, University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital, Cape Town, South Africa; Department of Surgery, Aga Khan University, Nairobi, Kenya.
Miriam
M
Mutebi
Department of Surgery and Global Health Medicine, University of Washington, Division of Public Health Sciences, Seattle, WA, USA; Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA, USA.
Benjamin O
BO
Anderson
Department of Health Policy and Management, Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA.
Jane
J
Kim
Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH), Seattle, WA, USA.
Jose
J
Jeronimo
Prevention and Implementation Group, International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France.
Rolando
R
Herrero
Department of Medicine, Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada.
Karen
K
Yeates
Institute of Cancer Policy, Women's College Research Institute, Faculty of Medicine, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada; WHO, Geneva, Switzerland.
Ophira
O
Ginsburg
Screening Group, International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon, France.
Rengaswamy
R
Sankaranarayanan
D019049:Developed Countries; D003906:Developing Countries; D055088:Early Detection of Cancer; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007182:Income; D030361:Papillomavirus Infections; D053918:Papillomavirus Vaccines; D011203:Poverty; D002583:Uterine Cervical Neoplasms
D053918:Papillomavirus Vaccines