Yet, in 2023, 123,000 Indian women were diagnosed with cervical cancer and almost 80,000 of them died.
India bears one-fifth of the global burden of cervical cancer and the highest number of deaths.
Every seven minutes, one woman dies of cervical cancer in India.
I met many cervical cancer patients from rural India at the GCRI, mostly between the ages of 40 and 60.
She has stage-3 C cervical cancer and the prognosis is poor.
This piece is supported by the Pulitzer Center.
The flow of patients is incessant at the outpatient departments of the Gujarat Cancer Research Institute (GCRI). The tertiary cancer centre caters to 25,000 patients annually from across the state, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, and the treatment is mostly subsidised under various government schemes.
In the gynaecology OPD, on the ground floor, nurses call out patients and a team of two doctors examine the patient. Between seeing patients, Chetna Parekh, professor of gynaecological oncology at the institute, explains that unlike most other cancers, cervical cancer is fully preventable and treatable yet it has poor outcomes in India. “Most of our patients come in the third and fourth stage and die within six months to a year of diagnosis,” she told Behanbox.
These tragedies are unacceptable because unlike most cancers that lack a clear cause, we know that cervical cancer is caused by the human papilloma virus (HPV) and there exists a vaccine to prevent HPV infections. Yet, in 2023, 123,000 Indian women were diagnosed with cervical cancer and almost 80,000 of them died. India bears one-fifth of the global burden of cervical cancer and the highest number of deaths.
Every seven minutes, one woman dies of cervical cancer in India. Yet, screening rates remain abysmal, the HPV vaccine available for more than two decades is yet to be included in India’s free vaccination programme and there is very little awareness about the disease.
Mridu Gupta, who heads a non-profit for cancer awareness, prevention, and early detection (CAPED) believes it to be a gendered crisis. “If it were a cancer that affected men and killed one man every seven minutes, do you think it would take so long for the [HPV] vaccine and the screening to be available for all of them?” Women’s health is simply not backed by political will, and there is no urgent effort to increase awareness, she said.
I met many cervical cancer patients from rural India at the GCRI, mostly between the ages of 40 and 60. About 80 percent of them were diagnosed when they were at stage 3. Jassuben is one of them.
The 30-year-old from a farming family in Amreli, 270 km from Ahmedabad, sat with her back against the wall in Parekh’s cabin alongside her husband. She has stage-3 C cervical cancer and the prognosis is poor. She was diagnosed two years ago and treated, but by February this year, the cancer had spread. She will soon be initiated into palliative care.
Women with cancer also face more stigma, neglect and abandonment than men. That is why we at Behanbox, sought to explore how gendered cancer care for women is and the additional barriers women face in a three-part series.
In this first part, through visits to cancer centres in Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Raipur, I search for reasons why India lags behind in cervical cancer screening and find that it urgently needs to fill certain systemic gaps, start universal HPV vaccination programme and take some lessons from the robust cervical cancer screening programme of neighbour Bangladesh.
