The number of women going for cervical tests is at its lowest in 19 years. An all-women team at the US design firm behind early Apple computers hopes that replacing the 19th-century metal tool with their silicone model will help change that
You lie back, legs wide. You relax as much as you can. Anxiety makes you clench, because someone you probably don’t know is about to insert an implement into your vagina. This procedure is what most of us call a smear test (its official name is “cervical screening”) and it is the best prevention we have against cervical cancer, which kills an average of two women a day in the UK. “It’s generally never a pleasant experience,” says Andy Nordin, president of the British Gynaecological Cancer Society. “But it doesn’t have to be an ordeal.”
A cervical screening does not detect cancer itself; it finds cells that are abnormal. An 85% screening rate could see a 27% reduction in deaths over the next five years. But something is going wrong. Cervical screening is at its lowest rate in 19 years. The Jade Goody effect, named for the increase in women attending screening after the reality TV star died of the disease in 2009, has disappeared. In 2015 and 2016, only 72.7% of eligible women went to a screening when invited. That doesn’t sound too bad, but it means 1.2 million women didn’t attend.
What is keeping women away? All sorts: fear of pain; embarrassment; the fact that no woman likes lying supine while being probed with an instrument by a stranger. Perhaps the vaginal speculum has something to answer for. It looks like an alarming tool; its two arms forming the shape of a duck’s bill. There is a screw on the outside that can pinch the labia as it is inserted (although most providers cover it). It can make unsettling noises. In short, it looks like what it is: something devised by male gynaecologists in the 19th century. Nowadays, disposable plastic ones are commonly used. They’re not as cold: speculums being warmed on radiators used to be a common sight. But plastic ones have their flaws, too, and not just the fact that they are disposable and used in their hundreds of thousands. “The plastic speculum can be more difficult to remove,” says Dr Virginia Beckett, of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. “Plastic doesn’t ‘run’ as well as metal so it can get caught.” Read more....