PUBLIC HEALTH PAST AND PRESENT
Debates about cervical screening: an historical overview
Correspondence to:
Dr L Bryder, University of Auckland, 5 Wynyard Street, Auckland, New Zealand; l.bryder@auckland.ac.nz
Accepted 23 April 2007
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Population-based cervical screening has been promoted widely and enthusiastically as a preventive measure for cervical cancer since the development of the Papanicolaou smear test in the 1940s. In 1984 the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Co-ordinating Committee on Cervical Screening1 confidently announced "With the exception of stopping the population from smoking, cervical cytological screening offers the only major proved public health measure for significantly reducing the burden of cancer today."
Throughout its history, however, the ‘Pap’ smear has been subject to intense criticism. Critics have wondered whether many lesions or dysplasias identified by smears and treated would have developed into cancer if left alone. From the 1960s, in the light of the growing importance attached to the sciences of biostatistics and epidemiology, others questioned whether screening programmes had reduced the incidence of cervical cancer. Feminists from the 1980s critiqued the interventionist medical model, arguing that the costs to individual women outweighed
CiteULike 
Complore 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us 
Digg 
Reddit 
Technorati What's this?
Relevant Article
- In this issue
- Carlos Alvarez-Dardet and John Ashton
J Epidemiol Community Health 2008 62: 281.[Extract] [Full Text] [PDF]
- Full Text
- Full Text (PDF)
- Submit a response
- Alert me when this article is cited
- Alert me when eLetters are posted
- Alert me if a correction is posted
- Citation Map
Services
- Email this link to a friend
- Similar articles in this journal
- Similar articles in PubMed
- Add article to my folders
- Download to citation manager
- Request Permissions
Citing Articles
Google Scholar
PubMed
Topic Collections
-
Smoking and tobacco
-
Cervical screening
-
Screening (oncology)
-
Screening (epidemiology)
-
Health education
- Relevant Article
Bookmark with
Register for free content
The full back archive is now available for all BMJ Journals. Institutional subscribers may access the entire archive as part of their subscription. Personal subscribers will also have access to all content when logged in. Non-subscribers who register have free access to all articles published before 2006 right back to volume 1 issue 1. Register here to access the free archive of all BMJ Journals.
Don't forget to sign up for content alerts so you keep up to date with all the articles as they are published.
