Just recently, a new vaccine has come out for girls 9 to 26 years old, targeting a few strains of HPV (Human Papillomavirus). The reason? HPV is a sexually transmitted disease that most women will get over the course of their life, whether they are aware of it or not. A few strains of this virus are responsible for most of the cervical cancers that plague women today. Even with the vaccine, though, women still need to get exams done, since the vaccine does not protect against all cancer causing strains of the virus.
Now, it seems there are genetic tests that may do away with the Pap smears that women are accustomed to getting once a year. The smears themselves are not terribly effective, only catching lesions about 50% to 80% of the time, and about 4% are ambiguous--no result can be determined from them. The reason they are so widely used as a cancer screening is that they check for lesions that take many years to develop, over which time, many smears will be done. They are also relatively inexpensive, costing about $20 each. This new genetic test, though, is much more effective in catching the cancer. With the widespread use of the vaccine, the number of lesions will also go down, and hopefully less women will get cervical cancer, thus the smears will become more costly on a per cancer case basis. This test not only tests for the DNA of several strains of the virus once (making it more reliable than simply looking at a smear), but it is much less likely to produce the ambiguous results. It does cost more, but Kaiser Permanente has found a way to cut the costs by giving both a Pap smear and the genetic test one year, and waiting another three years for the next testing, assuming both tests return negative.
With all these introductions of ways to prevent and treat cervical cancer early, the threat of this cancer will most certainly decline, and better tests will come out aiding in the testing of women. Our next step is to work on prostate cancer.
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Where do you go for that??? My exams cost about $180, plus $75 for the lab tests. And everything has always been normal and functioning properly! I think i'm getting ripped off.
Jessie
Well, I get everything free, cause my insurance rocks (well, it does for the next 4 1/2 years, anyway). But that figure was according to the article. The difference probably accounts for the payment that the OBGYN and lab techs get for running the tests, but the cost of the test itself is like $20. Make sense?
This website shows that the cost of a pap smear is about $20. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=hstat1.table.7243
~C
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Just speaking from the transgendered side of things....If they can get this sort of genetic testing worked out and made publicly (and affordably) accessable, I'd jump at the opportunity. I have to get a pap every year until I get certain parts removed and each time it's just extremely humiliating and degrading (as I'm sure it would be for a girl to have to get prostate checks if she was physically male)...
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"Our lives begin to end when we become silent about things that matter."
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Live one day at a time, emphasizing ethics rather than rules."
-Wayne Dyer
That's actually pretty cool. I mean, not the whole cancer part, but that they figured out a more efficient and accurate way to test for it. I hope that it becomes more...accessible, I suppose, by the time I'm old enough to have to get checked for it often? I don't know if that made sense...but whatever. It's kind of neat that they're figuring out all these new ways to diagnose or cure diseases that were once untreatable or quite difficult to detect. Now all they need to do is get rid of side effects....(all though I suppose most tests don't have those...)
well, you r right.....i guess i just wanted to find out other ppl's opinions.....i mean, i have female friends who keep on whining about how we men r strong and suppress them...and i always tell them, jokingly, that men should be afraid of women coz it's all over history....adam and eve, helen of troy,samson and delilah....in short, women can very easily control men without being physical about the whole thing! about men keeping things bottled up....well, society has a lot to do with it...a man who is emotional, very openly at least, is looked down on....we have been made to believe that being emotional means you are weak!..
go to go....thanx for the comment.
*Josh*
Not that I mind or anything, but why did you put this comment in my blog as well?
~C
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Thanks for the tip - my computer is so slow I thought it just wasn't submitting my post.