Exploratory study of a long-term hospital-based cervical cancer screening program in a high HIV prevalence area of rural Malawi
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Malawi has one of the highest incidence and mortality rates of cervical cancer in the world. • National efforts to screen all women age 25–50 at least once are implemented via community-based cervical cancer screening programs. • The high rates of HIV seen in this study demonstrate the success of the referral process from existing HIV treatment clinics. • Further community outreach efforts, modeled upon the program described here, should target all women in the community, regardless of HIV status. Malawi has the second-highest incidence and highest cervical cancer-attributed mortality worldwide. National HIV prevalence is 7.7%. Malawi implemented the Cervical Cancer Control Plan in 1999. We conducted an exploratory study of a non-government, hospital-based cervical cancer screening program established in the Southern Region. We performed a retrospective review of outcomes from a cervical cancer screening program at a 275-bed rural mission hospital from 1/2016 – 12/2021. Female patients 18 years and older presenting for cervical cancer screening were included. Outcomes included trends in screening modality, return screening rates, abnormal screening rates, and the COVID pandemic impact. Data abstracted included demographics, HIV status, screening modality, and follow-up information. 15,432 patients were screened for cervical cancer during the study period, with an overall increase in annual number of patients screened, despite the COVID-19 pandemic. Screening was initially performed via Pap testing; Visual inspection with acetic acid became the most common screening modality in 2019 (69.4%). HIV prevalence among screened patients increased over the study period to 82.0% in 2021 and was higher among return screening patients (89.0%). 4.3% of HIV-negative and 7.2% of HIV-positive women demonstrated abnormal screening results. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of patients screened for cervical cancer annually increased over the study period. HIV prevalence in this study was much higher than the national prevalence. These results emphasize the successful collaboration between a national program, private hospital, and HIV treatment centers, and highlight the need to increase screening among healthy women in the community.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".