Cervical Cancer Prevention
Partnering with others to eliminate a preventable disease.....
Cervical Cancer Prevention
Cervical Cancer continues to be the leading cause of cancer death among women in Guatemala. Among the reasons for this is a lack of an effective prevention program; a special tragedy since cervical cancer is 100% preventable....
SewHope has already done almost 6000 pap smears in Guatemala and all women with precancerous lesions have been treated and thus spared an early death from this terrible disease.
We are now working with Zonta International and Rotary International to develop a sustainable program. We are now working to develop a School for Cytotechnology as well as a program that will ultimately provide a solution to the devastating toll that this disease is having ont he women of Guatemala.
Cervical cancer continues to have a major impact on women worldwide, particularly on women in developing countries like Guatemala. The most recent data indicates an estimated 466,000 new cases of cervical cancer each year with nearly 80% of those cases occurring in developing countries. It is the leading cause of cancer death among women, killing 288,000 each year. Again, 80% of these are in developing countries and 77,000 of these cases are in Central America.
In the US, a woman has a lifetime risk of 8/100,000 of developing the disease. In Guatemala, the risk is 40 in 100,000 and these estimates are assumed to be grossly underestimated due to the methods of data collection in this country. Although significant declines in mortality from cervical cancer have been observed in the US, Canada and other developed nations, no such declines have been observed in Latin America.
SewHope has already done almost 6000 pap smears in Guatemala and all women with precancerous lesions have been treated and thus spared an early death from this terrible disease.
We are now working with Zonta International and Rotary International to develop a sustainable program. We are now working to develop a School for Cytotechnology as well as a program that will ultimately provide a solution to the devastating toll that this disease is having ont he women of Guatemala.
Cervical cancer continues to have a major impact on women worldwide, particularly on women in developing countries like Guatemala. The most recent data indicates an estimated 466,000 new cases of cervical cancer each year with nearly 80% of those cases occurring in developing countries. It is the leading cause of cancer death among women, killing 288,000 each year. Again, 80% of these are in developing countries and 77,000 of these cases are in Central America.
In the US, a woman has a lifetime risk of 8/100,000 of developing the disease. In Guatemala, the risk is 40 in 100,000 and these estimates are assumed to be grossly underestimated due to the methods of data collection in this country. Although significant declines in mortality from cervical cancer have been observed in the US, Canada and other developed nations, no such declines have been observed in Latin America.
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No More - A Documentary
A small team of film makers from "Word on Cancer" (see wordoncancer.org) came with us on our February, 2012 Cervical Cancer Prevention trip and filmed hundreds of hours of footage to make a documentary about our work. See the "snippets here to see how the movie is coming along! |
Flori
Click here to read the story of Flori, a young woman who became like family to us but tragically died in 2011 from Cervical Cancer, a completely preventable disease.