News Article

     Shari Roan published the article "New guidelines discourage annual Pap tests," on the Los Angeles Times website. For generations of women, it has been a medical necessity to get a Pap test every year. Now groups of medical experts say that having cervical cancer screening once a year is not necessary and, in fact, should be discouraged. Many women can wait as long as five years between screenings, the new guidelines say. The call for screening cutbacks is based on evolving knowledge over the last decade about human papillomavirus, a common sexually transmitted disease that causes most cervical cancers, and the availability of an HPV test that shows whether a woman has been infected with the most common variants of the virus. By having both a Pap smear and an HPV test, women ages thirty and sixty-five can safely go five years between screenings if the results are negative. Studies show that the death rate for cervical cancer is not affected by lengthening screening intervals.

     Both the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and the medical groups led by the American Cancer Society continue to emphasize that Pap tests are important. More than 11,000 new cases of cervical cancer are diagnosed each year in the U.S. and about 4,000 woman die from the disease, largely because they did not get screened and their cancers were caught too late. I think that this new research is very important and lets woman know when and how they should get checked. They do not need to waste money every year for Pap tests and can go with longer intervals because now technology and science are stronger and detecting diseases has been much easier and convenient.