For the ladies. You know who you are.

[ZombieHorde]

The Cancer That Shouldn't Be
Claire Cain Miller

Cervical cancer is almost entirely preventable with a new genetic test. Yet doctors still cling to the highly unreliable Pap smear. Something is very wrong here.

snip

It borders on the scandalous that cervical cancer, among the few cancers that are preventable, kills 310,000 women a year worldwide. In 2007, 11,150 women in the U.S. were diagnosed with it. Half of them had not had a recent Pap test. Another third did get tested but got false negatives from the 65-year-old Papanicolaou biopsy. The Pap test is valuable, having cut the rate of cervical cancer by 70%, but it is archaic. It calls on a lab technician or machine to peer at a daub of cervical cells under a microscope to spot the abnormal precancerous ones. This artisanal approach yields false negatives between 13% and 45% of the time.

snip

For $49, 12 bucks more than a Pap, Qiagen's HPV test can spot the genetic fingerprint of the human papilloma virus that hides within cervical cells. HPV infection is a necessary precursor to cancer. Catch it early and you won't get cervical cancer. The Food & Drug Administration approved Digene's HPV test in 2003 for cervical cancer screening alongside the Pap for women over 30. It gives a false negative for precancer only 5% of the time. Yet three-quarters of women in the U.S. have never taken it.

One reason doctors like the Pap is that it brings patients back every year. The HPV test is needed only once every three years because the test is so accurate and most women fight off HPV infections on their own. Without Pap as a draw, doctors are concerned their patients will fall behind on other checkups like breast exams. Docs are also afraid of losing the income from annual visits, says Walter Kinney, a gynecologic oncologist at Kaiser Permanente in Sacramento, Calif.

-----------
more at link:
http://www.forbes.com/business/forbes/2008/0128/060.html