By Tobias Lengnan Dapam
Former Most Beautiful Girl in Nigeria (MBGN) 2012, Isabella Agbor Ayuk, on Thursday, organised community sensitisation, free cervical cancer screening and treatment for women in Ushafa community, Bwari Area Council of the FCT.
The medical outreach which registered about 200 women beneficiaries was part of activities to mark this year’s International Women’s Day.
The Programme also featured capacity building exercise for primary healthcare workers in the community on early detection and treatment of various ailments.
In a chat with journalists at the Ushafa Primary Healthcare Centre, where the outreach took place, Ayuk expressed concern over the low-level of awareness, on the part of women, on the need to go for regular screening for early detection of the disease.
The former beauty queen noted that limited human and financial resources, uninformed and disempowered female population, poverty, and poorly developed health care centres were some of the reasons responsible for the high rate of deaths among women in the country due to cervical cancer.
According to her, “in Nigeria, it is reported that over 30 million women of reproductive age are at risk of developing cervical cancer with an estimated 10,000 deaths annually.
“Cervical screening helps diagnose the disease at an early pre-cancerous stage so that necessary measures can be applied to ensure the ailment does not develop. So, the essence of screening tests conducted on these women is to identify pre-cancerous changes in the cells of the cervix that could develop into cancer. I believe that with successful cervical cancer screening, we can bring down the scary number of deaths linked to the disease.”
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