According to Reuters, doctors claimed that a new rapid cervical cancer test, known as care HPV, will significantly aid women in developing countries.

In a trial involving 2,388 women ages 30 to 54 from the Shanxi province of eastern China, the test proved to be 90 percent efficient in spotting cervical cancer. It is manufactured by Qiagen NV and was designed with the aim of detecting 14 high-risk types of HPV in an estimated 2.5 hours. It is a follow-up of Hybrid Capture 2, a similar HPV detection test developed to spot 18 HPV types divided into high-risk groups and low-risk ones, Agence France-Presse reported.
 
Developing countries have encountered problems regarding an appropriate screening for cervical cancer for the reason that mortality rate from the disease is high. Care HPV may be the key, considering that it was 90 percent accurate in the trial. "The ability of the care HPV test to detect precancerous cells was found to be 90 percent; 84.2 percent of the women without precancerous disease were identified as negative by the test," researchers said. On top of its efficiency, it is very affordable and doesn’t involve electricity or running water.

On the word of John Sellors, a professor of family medicine at the McMaster University in Canada, provided that women 30 years or more would be screened “at least once in their lifetimes with such a test, and appropriate treatment administered at the same visit,” deaths caused by “cervical cancer would be reduced by a third.

Worldwide, cervical cancer is the fifth most deadly cancer in women, leading to the deaths of about 300,000 of them each year. 85 percent of them happen in developing countries.

The findings of the trial have been published in the The Lancet Oncology.