Without any community consultation, radical changes were made to cervical screening in Australia last December. The Pap smear is no longer the “front line” tool in preventative cervical cancer screening. We believe this will put women’s lives at risk.
Without any community consultation or in fact without the community even being aware of the proposal, radical and sweeping changes were made to the National Cervical Screening Program (NCSP).
Introduced in 1991 the current NCSP offers routine biennial Pap smear screening for all women aged 18-69 years. The program has had great success. As a result of its introduction, both the incidence and mortality of cervical cancer has halved to one of the lowest in the world.
Now this has all changed. Rather than focus on cervical cancer detection, and thus, prevention, with biennial Pap smears; the new program relies primarily on human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination and triage HPV testing. This strategy is untested; unproven; and will put the lives of women, particularly young women, at risk.