Self-collection of vaginal specimens for HPV testing Authors' reply

摘要

Ourteams have long studied existing screening programmes in cooperation with the Mexican Government. In our experience, screening with cytology requires expensive infrastructure and frequent repetition of invasive sampling. By contrast, HPV testing is more sensitive and cost-effective, requires fewer screening rounds, and can be adapted to self-collected specimens. Our cost-effectiveness studies show that HPV testing is superior to cytology when real-world input data and realistic prices are used.3 We have also assisted in major efforts to increase screening coverage, leading to about 8-5 million cytology tests in 2011. Yet according to our recent audit,4 only 63 cancers were detected by the latest 1400 000 cytologies from women older than 25 years, at a cost of about US$20 million-quite a poor performance.