Vinegar can be used in cancer check

MANILA, Philippines – The vinegar you dip your chicharon in and use to flavor your paksiw can also be used to check if a woman is at risk for cervical cancer that affects some 7,000 Filipino women every year.

Vinegar contains acetic acid that could be used to determine if a woman’s cervix has lesions that could lead to cancer, according to Dr. Cecilia Ladines-Llave, program director of the Cervical Cancer Prevention Network Program (CECAP).

Llave said the procedure called Visual Inspection with Acetic Acid (VIA) is endorsed by the Department of Health (DOH) as a primary screening modality for cervical cancer through an administrative order (AO) issued in Oct. 2005.

“VIA is the best alternative to pap smear,” she said in a forum at the Philippine General Hospital’ (PGH) Cancer Institute, which she also heads.

With the use of a cotton swab, vinegar is applied on the cervix. And if a part of the cervix turns pale or white, there may be lesions or some forms of abnormality there, warranting further screening.

Under the AO, all health centers must be capable of conducting VIA. Pap smear, which costs around P800, will then be used as a diagnostic tool for acetic positive cervices.

“VIA is cheaper and the result is seen at once. While in pap smear, it takes a while for the result of the tests to come out,” Llave pointed out.

The cervix is the lower part of the uterus. Cancer develops there because of Human Papillomavirus (HPV), the most common sexually transmitted disease (STD).

Worldwide, two women die of cervical cancer every two minutes and some 500,000 new cases occur annually. In the Philippines, there are 7,000 new cases every year and 67 percent of them are diagnosed at the late stage of the illness. The costs of diagnosis and treatment range from P15,000 to P750,000.

Dr. Jean Toral, an OB-Gynecologist at the PGH and a consultant of CECAP, said there is no updated registry on cervical cancer in the Philippines so the actual situation may even be underestimated.

Toral claimed that women become prone to this cancer if they have early sexual activity, if they or their partners have multiple sex partners and if they have a history of STD.

But HPV can be transmitted even in non-penetrative sexual contact. The virus can be acquired through “genital-genital; manual-genital and oral-genital” contacts.

The other transmission routes include smoking, prolonged use of oral contraceptives and immuno suppressions like Human Immuno-deficiency Virus and chronic corticosteroid use in asthma and lupus cases.

In “rare” and “not-well documented cases,” HPV can be spread through mother-to-newborn transmission and through fomites like undergarments, surgical gloves and biopsy forceps.

Toral added that cervical cancer could be prevented through anti-HPV vaccination ideally before the HPV infection sets in, at the early stage of the infection or long before “pre-cancerous lesions” develops.

But Toral admitted that many Filipino women could not afford to undergo the required three doses of vaccinations priced at some P5,000 each.   – Sheila Crisostomo