Women in the country have been advised to be seriously cautious of cervical cancer, a disease which kills over 1600 women every year.
Community of St Egidio through Disease Relief Excellent and Advanced Means (DREAM) country programme manager, Lawrence Alumando, said these to women during awareness campaign on Monday at Phalombe secondary school ground.
Alumando said there is mass screening exercise in the district from Tuesday October 2 to Friday October 5, mainly in eight health centres where women will be accessing cervical cancer services for free.
“We are in Phalombe which is one of the impact areas where we are working on issues of cervical cancers, so we decided to have awareness campaign which we aim to reach out to many women so that they should be screened and get help,” he said.
With support from Norwegian Church Aid (NCA), DREAM is implementing the project to three districts in the country namely; Phalombe, Mangochi and Balaka.
Programme Coordinator for health of NCA, Dunia Mphande, said they engaged DREAM through offering of training and providing training.
“We decided that we should engage DREAM considering the burden we have as a country on issues of cervical cancer. So we are giving them support in terms of training to the health personnel, buying equipment and I can tell you that we are making a progress on this fight against cervical cancer,” said Mphande.
On her part, Phalombe district cervical cancer coordinator, Ella Mkandawire, said they are targeting to reach about 3000 women aged between 15 to 45 during the exercise with an aim of reducing the current prevalence rate in the district which is at four percent.
“We want to reach to 3000 women. Our current prevalence rate here is at 4% which means that out of 100 women that we screen four are found to be positive. We are not happy at all with that rate though it may look small,” said Mkandawire.
Among other eight facilities which will be conducting the exercise are: Phalombe, Mkhwayi, Mpasa, Nkhulambe, Chiteketsa, Nambazo.
DREAM is a global health care which aims to lessen non-communicable and communicable diseases.
