by Dr. Cecilia A. Ladines-Llave,chair of the UP-PGH Cancer Institute
(This paper was presented at the John Hopkins-JHPIEGO Global Conference on Low-Resource Setting Cervical Cancer Prevention, held in Bangkok, Thailand on Dec. 4, 2005)
Incidence
Worldwide, one woman dies of cervical cancer every 2 minutes, and some 500 thousand new cases of this disease are seen every year.
About 80% or 400 thousand of these new cases are in developing countries. Of these 400 thousand, 50% or 200 thousand are in Asia.
In the Philippines, conservative estimates in 2000 placed the number of cervical cancer cases at between 35 thousand and 70 thousand, to which almost 7 thousand new cases are added every year.