China: Cervical Cancer Test Poised to Be a Boon in Developing World

An affordable and simple test for 14 high-risk strains of human papillomavirus (HPV) was highly accurate in a trial in rural China, researchers reported Sunday.

Routine cervical cancer screening has cut mortality from the disease in advanced industrial nations by 50-80 percent. However, the sophisticated laboratory equipment needed is a barrier for many poor nations, which may lack medical infrastructure and even electricity in remote areas.

Investigators used careHPV, a test that amplifies HPV DNA, to screen 2,388 women ages 30-54 in Shanxi province, China. The test accurately detected 90 percent of Pap smears identified as pre-cancerous by lab screening, and 84.2 percent of those identified as not precancerous.

CareHPV, a product devised by Qiagen NV (formerly Digene Corp.) and the US non-governmental organization Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH), does not require access to a power line or running water, and it can be utilized by non-technical support staff. The device takes up workspace about the size of a tabloid newspaper. Test results can be obtained in about two-and-a-half hours, so patients could be screened and treated in one visit. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded the research.

"If women 30 years and older could be screened at least once in their lifetimes with such a test, and appropriate treatment administered at the same visit, public health programs would be affordable and deaths from cervical cancer would be reduced by a third," said study co-author John Sellors of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.

The full report, "A New HPV-DNA Test for Cervical Cancer Screening in Developing Regions: A Cross-Sectional Study of Clinical Accuracy in Rural China," was published in Lancet Oncology (2008;doi:10.1016/S1470-2045(08)70210-9).

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