Script.

To begin, I want to provide some general statistics about the global burden of cervical cancer
before moving onto Rwanda.

Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer amongst women in the world, as there over
500,000 new cases each year and about 275,000 deaths according to the HPV centre
information centre.

This cancer mainly affects the poorest of nations, as 77% of all new instances of Cervical
cancer and 88% of deaths caused are in developing nations, where 95% of women have never
been screened.

In developing countries there are many barriers that prevent proper implementation of
cervical cancer screening programs.

-there is a lack of necessary equipment

-lack of resources
-competing healthcare priorities (maternal and perinatal mortality, AIDS, TB)
-low level of education of women.

It is estimated that about 4.7 % of women in the general population of East Africa are infected
with the HPV 16/18 strain.

Now out of the nearly 12 million people that reside in Rwanda, about 3.67 million women ages
15 and above are at risk of developing cervical cancer in their lifetimes.

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It is estimated that in 2012, there were about 1366 new cases of cervical cancer in Rwanda.

The crude incidence rate per 100,000 women was 23.8. And the age standardized incidence
rate was 41.8

Age standardization is a technique that is used to allow populations to be compared when the
age profiles of the populations are quite different.

The cumulative risk simply refers to the likelihood that someone who is cancer free will develop
cancer by a certain age. Here it shows that the likelihood of a woman developing cervical
cancer by the age of 75 is 4.5%
Now this table compares the incidence numbers to that of East Africa and the rest of the
world. If you notice, the incidence numbers and the cumulative risk is lower than that of
East africa. There is a very good reason for this, and I will explain at the end of the
presentation

The second table here refers to the risk factors of cervical cancer; smoking, number of live
births, oral contraception use and HIV prevalence.

The percentage of women who smoke is 5.6 %, the rate of live births per women is 4.6, the use
of oral contraception among women is 71.% and HIV prevalence is about 2.8%.

Now we move on to early intervention efforts. Truth be told, there was no early intervention
efforts designed to fight cervical cancer.

DOES ANYONE KNOW WHY? What was so unique about Rwanda that prevented any early
efforts to fight cervical cancer?