HsCC consortium partners, FHM and BHI just completed enrolling 5000 Haitian women to test the feasibility of developing a unified health care screen and treat program to prevent cervical cancer in Haiti. This strategy was approved by the Ministry of Health at the annual HsCC meeting in 2018. This project began 5 years ago. After enrolling the first ~2000 women, we discovered that Haiti does not have enough nitrous oxide gas to support a national cervical cancer program and we introduced thermoablation as an alternative treatment. The program enrolled another 3000 women and demonstrated that the thermoablation was well received by both patients and providers. We also developed and field-tested a cloud-based REDCap database that can be used by all programs as the network of programs grows.
Partnership with the Caris Foundation
FHM and the Caris Foundation developed a partnership to screen the HIV positive women that are receiving retroviral therapy through the PEPFAR program. As expected women with HIV are more likely to have HPV infections and this has generated a plan to conduct another research program to identify strategies that will help us identify the subset of women with more advanced cervical dysplasia. We hope that we can initiate this study in the Spring.