Cervical cancer was the seventh leading cause of cancer deaths in women in Taiwan in 2017, yet nearly 1 million women aged 36 to 69 have never had a pap smear, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said on Tuesday.
The agency said that cervical cancer was the leading cause of cancer deaths in women in 1995, taking the lives of 1,010 in one year, so the government put more effort into promoting public awareness and in 1995 began offering free pap smears to women over the age of 30.
The number of deaths dropped to 651 in 2017.
However, on average four people are diagnosed with cervical cancer and two die of the disease every day.
Among the nation’s 5.24 million women aged 36 to 69, about 2.93 million (56 percent) have had at least one pap smear within the past three years.
However, 985,117 (18.8 percent) have never had a pap smear; 643,015 (12.2 percent) had a test more than six years ago; and 685,974 (13 percent) had at least one test about three to six years ago.
The agency in 2017 surveyed women who had not received a pap smear in the past three years.
According to the survey, 43.6 percent of respondents said they did not think they needed it; 20.4 percent said they were too busy to go for a test; and 16.7 percent said they were old and did not need the test anymore.
HPA official Lin Li-ju (林莉茹) disagreed, saying data shows that pap smears detected about 97.3 percent of precancerous lesion and early stage cervical cancer (stage 0 to 1) cases in 2016.
Among those who were diagnosed with cervical cancer and did not have regular pap smears, only about 50.5 percent had early stage cervical cancer, Lin said.
While the five-year survival rate of women with cervical cancer in its early stages is more than 90 percent, the rate drops drastically to about 20 percent if the cancer is diagnosed at stage 4, Lin said, adding that early stage cervical cancer and pre-cancers usually do not have symptoms, so going for a regular pap smear would be the best way to detect them.
The agency urged women to have at least one test every three years.
Those who are no longer in sexually active or are postmenopausal should also receive a regular pap smear, it added.
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