Cervical cancer burden remains high in many countries, scale-up needed to meet WHO’s 2030 elimination target

Cervical cancer is largely preventable due to HPV vaccination and screening. In 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) announced a target to  eliminate cervical cancer as a public health problem, aiming to reduce incidence below a threshold of four cases per 100,000 women per year in every country by 2030. This study tracks the progress on cervical cancer rates and identifies the countries and regions where efforts require scaling up to reach WHO targets.

While a decrease in screening intensity due to the COVID-19 pandemic might have left a new group of susceptible women, the pandemic also boosted the introduction of self-administered HPV testing, offering new possibilities to increase screening coverage.

Other new advancements, such as thermal ablation for treating cervical pre-cancer, the use of mobile phones to improve follow-up after screening, and machine learning to improve visual assessment, can also be used in low resource settings to lower cervical cancer rates.