The World Health Organisation is launching the new guidelines on cervical cancer prevention and control. This is really a new approach to cervical cancer prevention and control because we recommend a lifelong cost approach so at which age of life we can prevent or treat cervical cancer. So we start with a vaccination and we’ve got new recommendations on the use of two doses of HPV vaccines, that’s for young girls before their sexual life starts. Then we go to screening of cervical cancer, treatment of women of 30 years old and more. I just want to [specify] on screening that there are three tests that we recommend at the moment – HPV testing, visual inspection with acetic acid and Pap smear. The three tests really have to be taken at 30 years of age or after and the importance is for the first time WHO is recommending the use of HPV testing for cervical cancer prevention and treatment. Later in life this is treatment of invasive cancer and palliative care, so the three points of prevention.

So the guideline development process in WHO is quite a painful and long process that we review all the available evidence, published and non-published reports, data from researchers that are not published. So we review all of these and we do the synthesis of the evidence then we grade the evidence according to the quality of the evidence. Then a group of not only experts but a group of experts, a group of patients, different people, healthcare providers, they look at the available evidence and then from that we develop the recommendations. So it’s a very complex and very interesting process.

It’s still difficult; many countries rely on the WHO recommendations on the use of tests, on the use of treatment, on the use of prevention, of vaccines. So that’s really the role of WHO demanded to provide the best evidence based information to implement interventions to improve health in countries.