Screening campaign to fight against cervical cancer launched in Yaounde

The National Committee for the Fight Against Cancer (NCFC) has launched a massive screening campaign to fight against cervical cancer at the Ekoumdoum Baptist hospital in Yaounde. This was on January 25th, 2023.
According to the World Health Organization, cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer affecting women worldwide as 604,000 women have been infected since 2020 with over 342,000 deaths. It is reported that 90% of cases and these deaths occurred in low and middle-income countries.

In Cameroon, cervical cancer is the second gynecological cancer after breast cancer and the leading cause of cancer deaths in women.
The alarming situation, is the reason why the NCFC has developed strategies to overcome this occurence.

During a press conference organized on January 21, the leaders of this committee took the oath of raising women’s awareness on the curability of this disease, in the event of rapid screening, as noted by Dr. Penlap Yvette, a community health expert at NCFC.
“We are running campaigns regularly throughout the national territory, precisely during January, which is specially dedicated to the fight against this cancer. We insist a lot on primary and secondary prevention. Primary, in particular with the vaccine against HPV, which is the virus mainly responsible for cancer of the cervix, and secondary prevention, which concerns screening. We encourage women of child-bearing age to get screened regularly because this cancer is preventable, and can be prevented by vaccination, but can also be cured if screened early,” she explained.

It is in this context that the Cameroon Baptist Convention, a partner of the NCFC through its health unit, decided in its hospital center of Ekoumdoum to initiate a screening and awareness campaign from January 25th.

According to Mrs. Manjuh Florence, Vice-President of the African Organization for Research and Training of Cancer for Central Africa and Supervisor of the CBC Health Program, “this meeting is an opportunity for us to send a message. We can effectively fight cervical cancer. If we work together, we can make it happen and save lives.”