Alternative approaches to cervical cancer screening for developing countries

Cervical cancer remains the most common cancer among women living in developing countries, largely because of the failure either to initiate or sustain effective cervical-cancer screening programmes. This potentially preventable and curable cancer continues to cause high mortality among relatively young women residing in low-resource countries. Cytology as a screening test, linked with a robust healthcare infrastructure, has significantly affected cervical cancer prevention in countries that have had sufficient resources to establish and sustain well-conducted programmes. The failure to establish such programmes has stimulated a large body of research into alternative screening tests and approaches to cervical-cancer prevention. Two of the most recent research methods have been visual inspection with acetic acid and molecular testing for high-risk types of human papillomavirus deoxyribonucleic acid. Visual inspection with acetic acid has shown a great deal of promise in cross-sectional studies; however, in randomised-controlled trials, it has been shown to be significantly less effective in reducing cervical cancer or its precursors. The development of point-of-care human papillomavirus or other highly sensitive tests for the prevention of cervical cancer is imperative. It has also been clearly shown that linking testing or screening to treatment (so-called ‘screen and treat’) without the intervention of colposcopy or the need for sophisticated laboratories may potentially prevent cervical cancer in large numbers of women.