Cancer of the uterine cervix is the second most common cancer among women in India and we have the largest burden of cervical cancer patients in the world. More than three-fourths of these patients are diagnosed at advanced stages leading to poor prospects of long-term survival and cure. Organized population based screening programme have been shown to reduce the incidence and mortality from cervical cancer in many developed countries. Cervical cytology using Pap smear has been well established as the screening method for cervical cancer.
There have been a large number of studies, which have proved the effectiveness of alternate strategies such as visual inspection with acetic acid and other methods in different parts of the world including India. These approaches are found to be suitable in low resource settings and need to be studied in pilot programme. The Department of Cytology and…
