Women's Health Center Johns Hopkins Outpatient Center 601 N. Caroline St., 8th Fl. The prevention of cervical cancer by the screening for and treatment of pre-cancerous changes is one of the great success stories of Modern Medicine. Unfortunately, not all of the segments of the American populace have equally benefited from cervical cancer screening and this potentially lethal disease remains endemic in select subsets of Americans. The Pap Smear was named after the Greco-American pathologist who developed this valuable tool in the 1940's. The collected cells are placed on a glass slide, stained using special dyes, and then looked at under a microscope.
Treatment is recommended based upon the findings of the colposcopy and biopsies.
In part as a result of the wide spread use of the Pap smear, cervical cancer has gone from being the most common cause of cancer death for U.S. women in the 1940's, to not even being one of the Top Ten causes of cancer mortality in the late 1990's. Unfortunately, cervical cancer still kills many thousand American women each year. These barriers are numerous and include such varied realities as socio-cultural attitudes and lack of affordable and convenient screening. It is this latter barrier that can be, at least in theory, eliminated. Investigations completed within the last year have demonstrated that recent changes in the Medicare laws so that Pap smear screening is a covered benefit have led to decreasing rates of cervical cancer in those women covered by these programs.