MOTHER-CHILD PAIRS PROGRAM FOR ELIMINATING CERVICAL CANCER
Dr. Leela Digumarti designed this project to approach the child and her mother together, to screen the mother for cervical cancer with Liquid-Based Pap smears and/or HPV testing and vaccinate the child with quadrivalent HPV vaccination. With the help of volunteers from seversl NGOs, village schools are identified and adopted.
Since 2019, the Foundation was able raise funds to successfully screen women and vaccinate children in 5 villages: Appapuram in Srikakulam District, Uddanapuram, Vempadu and Pedaramabhadrapuram in East Godavari District and Dharnarayudupeta in Visakhapatnam. Children and their mothers from the Zilla Parishad School and Visakha Vimala Vidyalaya in Gantyada have also been screened and vaccinated. These activities have now been expanded to cover 15 villages across the Telugu states.
The cervical swabs are screened for HPV using RT PCR technique. Women who are HPV positive undergo colposcopy and locally ablative procedure to remove the abnormal tissue. The Digumarti Foundation sponsors the screening, including the cost of HPV testing, follow up and treatment. The foundation buys vaccines from the open market through the funds given by the donors.
The cost of screening and vaccination for each class of 80 students, is about ₹ 10.5 lakhs. Typical cost of providing the care for effective cervical cancer prevention per village is about ₹ 27-30 lakhs.
[1] Rath G.K. et al., Report of National Cancer Registry Programme (2012-2016), ICMR, (2020).
[2] Mathur P. et al. “Cancer statistics, 2020: report from national cancer registry programme, India.” JCO global oncology 6 (2020).
[3] Sathishkumar, K, et al., The Lancet Regional Health-Southeast Asia 24 (2024).
[4] WHO. Accelerating the elimination of cervical cancer as a global public health problem (2019).
[5] Banerjee, D. et al. “Screening technologies for cervical cancer: Overview.” Cytojournal 19 (2022).
[6] Government of India, NFHS 2019-21.