Society For Family Health screens women for Ca cervix on HWN CANCER UPDATE

A private international project for cervical cancer using social franchise has screened more than 15,000 women for pre-cancer lesions that might help them rule out the onset of cervical cancer.

The Cervical Cancer Screening and Prevention Therapy, which started in 2012 with funding from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is run by the Society for Family Health, Planned Parenthood Federation of Nigeria and Marie Stopes Nigeria, and hopes to increase the number of women screened or treated for cervical cancer before the project ends next year.

Under the social franchise model, women in communities classified as underserved are recruited by volunteers to attend free cervical cancer screening in more than a dozen facilities around Abuja and Nasarawa.

"Generally, up to 95% of them will be negative. You ask them to go back home and they come for a re-screening in three to five years," said Dr Peter Entonu, social manager of the project's social franchise unit.

Only a mere 5% could have lesions that could predispose them to cervical cancer are referred for treatment at a separate centre called Saffron, a Nyanya private hospital where the projects pay for cryotherapy that could cost as much as N20,000 in out-of-pocket health spending.

The cryotherapy treatment is an outpatient procedure during which a doctor alternately blasts and thaws the pre-cancerous lesions around the neck of the womb with jets of medical-grade carbondioxide.

SFH says the project is to transform access to cancer screening and treatment for millions of women in low- and middle-income areas by "integrating cervical cancer prevention and therapy with reproductive health services."