Australia to offer self-testing swabs to all women for cancer screening

Caitlin Rose was 21 years old and overdue for her screening when her then-partner pushed her to visit the doctor. Her HPV test detected subtypes of the virus that are responsible for 70 per cent of cervical cancers and precancerous lesions.

“Something that I had thought was not a big deal and I had been deferring for years suddenly became this really serious, potential cancerous thing,” Rose said, now 27, said.

A biopsy detected no cancer cells, “but this is now something I really need to keep a very close eye on,” she said. Rose, now 27, has HPV tests every six months.

“I still have girlfriends who just keep putting it off because it’s uncomfortable … Now that we have the option to do it ourselves it takes out that element of discomfort both physically and mentally,” she said.

An estimated 900 women were diagnosed with cervical cancer, and 237 died of the disease in Australia 2021.

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Women due for their HPV test can visit their GPs as usual where their doctor or nurse will explain both sample collection options and offer a private place to collect a sample using a PCR swab.

“It doesn’t need to get up to the cervix, Saville said. “It’s very easy and straight-forward.

HAS meta analysis found a cervical screening test using a self-collected vaginal sample is as accurate as a clinician-collected sample taken from the cervix during a speculum examination.

“We’re hoping that by making this universally available it becomes a choice for everyone,” Saville said. “There’ll be lots of women who appreciate that, myself included,” she said. “The speculum can be uncomfortable and unpleasant and it becomes more uncomfortable through menopause.”

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Deborah Bateson, Professor of Practice at the Daffodil Centre, Faculty of Medicine and Health at Sydney University, said Australia may be on track to become the first country to eliminate cervical cancer by 2035, “but we’re only going to get there if we can bring in these people who are under-screened”.

“Australia’s cervical cancer screening rate is about 56 per cent … and those rates would be significantly lower among some groups – people with disability, for instance,” Bateson said.

“Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women have almost a fourfold higher mortality rate from cervical cancer [than the general population]which is a terrible gap,” she said.

Allison Rossiter, managing director of Roche Diagnostics Australia, which supplies the self-testing kits, said the tests will be the most widely available in Australia.

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