How to redesign the vaginal speculum

The number of women going for cervical tests is at its lowest in 19 years. An all-women team at the US design firm behind early Apple computers hopes that replacing the 19th-century metal tool with their silicone model will help change that

You lie back, legs wide. You relax as much as you can. Anxiety makes you clench, because someone you probably don’t know is about to insert an implement into your vagina. This procedure is what most of us call a smear test (its official name is “cervical screening”) and it is the best prevention we have against cervical cancer, which kills an average of two women a day in the UK. “It’s generally never a pleasant experience,” says Andy Nordin, president of the British Gynaecological Cancer Society. “But it doesn’t have to be an ordeal.”

A cervical screening does not detect cancer itself; it finds cells that are abnormal. An 85% screening rate could see a 27% reduction in deaths over the next five years. But something is going wrong. Cervical screening is at its lowest rate in 19 years. The Jade Goody effect, named for the increase in women attending screening after the reality TV star died of the disease in 2009, has disappeared. In 2015 and 2016, only 72.7% of eligible women went to a screening when invited. That doesn’t sound too bad, but it means 1.2 million women didn’t attend.

Related: Australia could become first country to eradicate cervical cancer

Related: Cervical cancer deaths in over-50s predicted to rise sharply in England – study

Continue reading... April 23, 2018 at 09:53PM