World Health Organisation officials marked the first-ever World Cervical Cancer Elimination Day with a message filled with urgency and concern. They warned that South-East Asia, despite years of medical progress, still carries nearly one-fourth of the global cervical cancer burden, a troubling reality for a disease that is both preventable and treatable. In 2022 alone, the region saw 160,000 new cervical cancer cases and 100,000 deaths.
The organisation emphasized that every two minutes, a woman somewhere in the world dies from cervical cancer, even though effective tools for prevention, early detection, and treatment are widely available. WHO stressed the importance of meeting the 2030 global elimination targets: 90% HPV vaccination coverage among girls by age 15, high-performance screening for 70% of women at ages 35 and 45, and timely treatment for 90% of women diagnosed with…
