Representatives of the Costa Rican Social Security Fund (CCSS), the Ministry of Health and the National Agency for Biomedical Research (ACIB) participated in the “Strategies for the prevention and control of cervical cancer: reducing inequity in health” forum to discuss strategies and needs to fight the incidence and mortality of cervical cancer in Costa Rica.
The forum was held on Tuesday morning in the Legislative Assembly, where the need to include the vaccine against The Human Papillomavirus (HPV) in the health services was discussed. This vaccine can protect women between 30 and 64 years old, in areas far from the Central Valley.
Dr. Ileana Quirós, from the Technical Committee of Cancer of the Medical Management of the CCSS, explained that the institution has been working to capture this population that for some time has had medical follow-up focused on prevention, but laziness or ignorance have cause more deaths.
Cervical cancer is one of the most lethal for women. Fortunately, for many years now, the trend in both new cases and deaths has dropped by more than three quarters since 1960. The decline has been slow and cervical cancer is totally preventable, at least when is caused by the Human Papillomavirus (HPV). Before cancer develops there are many opportunities and possibilities of detection,”
commented Quirós.
At this time, the authorities have identified many populations that are behind, since they do not approach the health services, because they think it is not needed, they have no symptoms, have no partners or children and believe they are no longer at risk.
Now we want to improve the effectiveness and quality of screening. In the context of the National Development Plan there is a project that has a budget and we are working in the Chorotega Region (Guanacaste and Upala), in order to implement a pilot plan that tries to incorporate the HPV DNA test,”
said Quirós.
This test makes it possible to determine if a woman has the virus even though she has no visible lesions.
The idea of the CCSS is to start applying this test next year.