Don Cave in Vanuatu

Mater’s Director of Perinatal Medicine and Women’s Health Services Dr Don Cave spent 12 days in Port Vila, Vanuatu in March this year to follow up on a cervix cancer screening and treatment program. He was accompanied by Mater colleague, Stomal Therapy Nurse Petra Prokop, plus several others including GP Dr Margaret McAdam, who introduced and largely sponsored the project over the past 18 months.

Don and his colleagues repeated Pap smear screenings and colposcopies on more than 100 women who had been screened as abnormal and had thier abnormality treated on a previous visit. The success of this treatment was reviewed.

“Vanuatu is poor country with most of the population living in conditions which we would equate with developing or emerging countries,” Dr Cave said. “Cervical cancer is a major problem in Vanuatu and other developing nations but lack of funding prevents women from having routine PAP smears.”

Dr Cave’s group are studying a rapid, low cost method of detection of cervical cancer in women, called VIA/VILI.

“There is currently no cervical cancer screening program in Vanuatu resulting in the loss of many lives. The cost-effective VIA/VILI method means that countries like Vanuatu need not wait for their health infrastructure to approach that of an industrialised nation but can start saving lives immediately,” Dr Cave said.

Women in whom cervical cancer is detected are offered immediate treatment and many women have already had their lives saved.

“Initial results are positive, which means that there is every chance the technique can be used to save countless more lives in other developing countries,” Dr Cave said.

The project, in addition to evaluating VIA/VILI, will teach local nurses to conduct the screening and treatment process themselves, and develop appropriate training and educational materials for the local women and nurses.