Planned Parenthood Federation of Nigeria (PPFN) in collaboration with Peramere Medical and Defence and Police Officers’ Wives Association (DEPOWA) has commenced a free Cervical Cancer Screening and treatment for 1000 women in Abuja.
The DEPOWA President, Mrs Ogboho Musa, made this known on Monday in Abuja during the flag-off of the screening exercise, themed, “Cervical cancer screening: Early Detection Saves Lives”.
She expressed worry that cancer has been a huge challenge to women for many years, calling on women to take advantage of the free screening to check their cervical health status.
Musa who was represented by the consultant public health physician, Dr. Juliet Ango, said the target is to screen 1000 women with the Illumigyn Gynescope, explaining that the machine expands the services up to 10 times, giving visual room to pick any altered cancer cells.
“The initiative is very important, cancer has been a challenge to women for a long time and we have been advocating for early Detection, and early screening for cervical cancer, the screening measure available is the VIA which is visual inspection, but this initiative is Gynescope which is different from what we have on ground,” she said.
Meanwhile, the acting Director of Programs PPFN Dr. Paul Odigbo, noted that the initiative is meant to increase and expand access to cervical cancer screening for women.
He said,“it’ is an initiative we had with Premare Medicals to increase and expand access to cervical cancer screening for 1000 women and we are piloting this initiative here at the NHQ clinic.
“PPFN got a machine that can treat the minor legions or minor cervical cancer legions, we are able to dictate that is also one initiative we have put in place to ensure cervical cancer free nation.”
He said, ”the most vulnerable women are sexually active women and those that are immunodeficient, so If you are Immuno deficient, that is someone that has HIV they are going to have a high ability to contact this HPU cancer instead of having any form of legion than any other person.
”If in the course of screening, a woman is found to have symptoms of cervical cancer, the next step is staging, trying to look at the extent of the legion, that will help us to know whether we are going to do Cryotherapy.
”We talked about primary prevention, secondary and tertiary prevention so if it’s a case of secondary prevention and treatment that is where we would use the Cryotherapy, if it is bigger than that, if it is already an invasive cancer, that is where we would go to the tertiary aspect of the treatment and that requires referral to higher centres.