155,000 women born between 1947 and 1952 have been excluded from the national screening program for cervical cancer without being offered an HPV test. This concerns women in several regions.
An investigation by Dagens Nyheter shows that between 2020 and 2022, 94 of them developed cervical cancer, of which 76 percent of the cases were detected at an advanced stage. This can be compared to the cases detected in the screening program, where the proportion of cancer detected at an advanced stage is 3 percent.
The reason why the women were not offered the test is, according to DN, that they fell between the cracks when the regions, starting in 2015, changed testing methods, a process that took up to six years.
HPV is an abbreviation for human papillomavirus. Some types of HPV can cause cell changes that can develop into cancer, for example, in the cervix.
